Villa della Regina

On the hillside east of the Po, Villa della Regina preserves something rare in a capital city: a seventeenth-century suburban villa built around a working vineyard estate, frescoed for princes and queens, with terraced gardens, grottoes and water games looking straight back at Turin and its Alpine backdrop.

Why it matters

Villa della Regina grew up at the beginning of the seventeenth century on the Turin hill as a refined villa-with-vineyard wanted by the prince-cardinal Maurizio di Savoia, son of Duke Carlo Emanuele I, who modelled it on the scenographic elegance of the Roman villas he knew. What makes it special is the survival of that whole aristocratic idea — architecture, garden, agricultural land and view composed as one work — inside the boundaries of a modern city. Under royal ownership the villa took the name it still bears, and leading artists of the Savoy capital, including Giovan Battista Crosato, Corrado Giaquinto and Giuseppe Dallamano, enriched its halls with sumptuous decoration. Inscribed with the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1997, it returned to the public after decades of decline and wartime damage through a careful restoration, and it rounds off Turin's museum circuit with a hillside villa-and-vineyard ensemble.

What to notice

• The perspective from the gardens: from the terraces the villa looks straight down on the city, the Po and the crown of the Alps — the exact scenographic effect its designers intended, with Turin as the backdrop.
• The piano nobile frescoes by Crosato and Giaquinto, among the finest decorative ensembles of eighteenth-century Turin.
• The garden architecture: pavilions, grottoes, and the water games of the terraced slope, which the state's description lists among the elements that survived every change of function.
• The agricultural character: the estate has kept its vineyard identity since its founding as a suburban vineyard, and areas of agricultural land remain part of the protected complex.

Context and history

Maurizio di Savoia's villa rose from around 1615; after the prince's death in 1657 his wife Ludovica enlarged the complex, transforming gardens, buildings and decoration. In 1692 the property passed to Anna d'Orléans, consort of Vittorio Amedeo II, whose works under the direction of Filippo Juvarra and later Giovanni Pietro Baroni di Tavigliano redefined the residence as the Villa della Regina, harmonising architecture with the garden in a spectacular dialogue of building, nature and landscape. When Turin lost its role as capital of the Kingdom after 1865, the complex was donated to the National Institute for the Daughters of Military Families, which from 1869 ran it as a school for war orphans and daughters of decorated soldiers — a function that, remarkably, preserved the villa's architectural and landscape unity of pavilions, grottoes, fountains, gardens, park and farmland. Bombing in the Second World War caused grave damage; abandonment and unsuitable interventions then brought the complex close to collapse, until its 1994 transfer to the state superintendency began the recovery carried through by long restoration.