Castle of the Mandria, Royal Palace of Venaria
The Castle Village located within the natural park of the Herd was the residence of the Savoy since the 60s of the ‘ nineteenth century, when the first king of Italy Vittorio Emanuele II decided to settle here because of the proximity with the city of Turin that would become soon the first capital of Italy and to be able to live away from the Court with his lover first, and then morganatic wife, Rosa Vercellana. In addition, the king can devote himself here to his great passion: hunting. For this purpose, it surrounds the park with an approximately 27 km long city wall that still exists today and inserts various animal breeds into it. The architects Domenico Ferri worked on the Borgo Castello as regards the interior, Barnaba Panizza and the Ticino-born Leopoldo Galli for the exterior.
Surrounded by the lush greenery of the Park of La Mandria, the royal apartments of the Borgo Castello provide a fascinating connection between the natural environment and the Reggia. Bound to the destiny and the history of the Reggia di Venaria until the 19th century, the Castle of La Mandria became the personal retreat of Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy in 1859.
The beautiful Royal Apartments that are visible today were built in front of the Castle, which was the most significant building present in the Park. The apartments consist of 20 rooms that offer insights into the choices and the tastes of the king. Now open to the public, they paint an intriguing portrait of this charismatic figure of the Italian Risorgimento. It was at the Castle of La Mandria that the king spent part of his personal life with his morganatic wife, Rosa Vercellana (known as “Bela Rosin”), who was made Countess of Mirafiori and Fontanafredda.
The Royal Apartments are fully furbished and contain precious objects, artworks, textiles, furniture and furnishings from ancient Savoy collections that allow visitors to appreciate the taste of the first king of Italy.
History
The history of Borgo Castello is much earlier than the arrival of Vittorio Emanuele II. The first interventions date back to the early eighteenth century, more precisely to 1708 when the Duke of Savoy Vittorio Amedeo II commissioned the architect Michelangelo Garove to build a structure intended for the breeding of horses. Subsequently, Filippo Juvarra will work on it during the 1920s.
In 1860, at the request of Vittorio Emanuele II, work began on enlarging and equipping of the royal apartments restored and can be visited today, which also works Ernesto Melano, which turn it into complex of 35,000 m 2, which is today a rectangle 280 meters by 100 with three internal courtyards.
In 1861 the two hunting lodges were built on the estate, the Villa dei Laghi and La Bizzarrìa. Also in that period, Vittorio Emanuele II founded an acclimatization garden on the example of Londoners and Parisians, in which animals unrelated to the Piedmontese fauna can find a favorable environment for them. The aim was mainly hunting but also economic and commercial. At the same time the foundations of the neo-Gothic sleeve were laid and Vincenzo Vela sculpted the stone group depicting a sea horse struggling with a newt, placed in the fountain in the center of the first courtyard.
The buildings are all in terracotta, as for Palazzo Carignano. With the death of Vittorio Emanuele II, which took place in 1878, the estate was inherited by his son Umberto I who decided to get rid of it and in the nineteenth century he sold it to the family, recently ennobled under the title of marquis, Medici del Vascello. These tried in the first period to create a farm, but the land of the Herd was not suitable for cultivation, so in a second period they will devote themselves to breeding which instead will give good results so much that the estate always sees growing plus its inhabitants, who will come to be around 1000, thus giving life to a real community.
After the Second World War, however, the Marquises were forced to sell lots of land, part of which went to FIAT, which made it a test track, two more lots became golf courses, and in another portion an exclusive residential center was built.
In 1976 the Piedmont Region purchased the castle and over 1300 hectares of park, establishing the La Mandria Regional Park. In 1995 he bought the Villa dei Laghi that the Medici del Vascello had sold to a family of Milanese financiers, the Bonomi Bolchini. Since 1997, the body of the apartments and the neo-Gothic sleeve have been entered on the list of World Heritage Sites as part of the UNESCO site Savoy Residences
In 2018 the Borgo Castello della Mandria is in a state of neglect, since the works for the transformation and recovery of the nineteenth-century buildings in a touristic-tertiary key have been interrupted and no longer resumed.
The Royal Apartments
The Apartments of Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy and Rosa Vercellana (“Bela Rosin”), consisting of more than 20 rooms. The Royal Apartments are fully furbished and contain precious objects, artworks, textiles, furniture and furnishings from ancient Savoy collections that allow visitors to appreciate the taste of the first king of Italy.
The decorations and furniture were chosen by the Court Architect Domenico Ferri, who opted for figurative patterns that have been perfectly preserved in the various rooms. The rooms that make up the Royal Apartments of the Castle are home to the rich collections commissioned by Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy and have been completely refurnished according to archival documentation.
Thanks to extraordinary funding, more than 100 art masterpieces, 1200 square meters of decorations, 60 pieces of furniture, 130 square meters of previous textiles and 80 square meters of elegant wallpaper have been completely restored.
Exhibition Space
Temporary exhibitions at the Reggia di Venaria are organized in two spaces: the Juvarra Stables and the Rooms of the Arts.
The Juvarra Stables
The 18th century building that is home to the Citroniera (orangery) and the Great Stables is a stunning construction of impressive size and architectural design: it is here that major international exhibitions are held. Built in 1722-27 by Filippo Juvarra, the Citroniera – that was originally used to store citrus plants – and the Great Stables make up an imposing building that covers a 5,000 sq. m. area, each measuring 140 meters in length, almost 15 m in width and height. This is the largest exhibition space in the Reggia di Venaria.
The original budget for its construction was largely exceeded, and the building contractors complained about it while sparing no praise for this architectural feat: “They had us build an edifice of extraordinary height (…) more closely resembling a magnificent temple than a stable and an orangery”. The latter, originally conceived as a storage facility for ornamental citrus plants in the winter, provides a magnificent backdrop to the Flower Garden and its main entrance is aligned with one of the longest alleys: the Royal Alley. On the inside the Citroniera appears like a huge greenhouse with large windows opening to the south to maximize sun exposure.
The Citroniera
Coming in from the Gardens or the Bookshop, visitors step into the Citroniera and find themselves into a richly decorated and exceptionally bright central nave. This space was designed to inspire awe by virtue of its considerable proportions as well as its plastic and chiaroscuro effects: the niches that punctuate the side walls add a great dynamic flow to the outer shell of this building. To the south the arc-shaped openings are topped by oculi or round recesses to maximize light and heat in the winter, to the north the same architectural structures are replicated on the partition wall that separates this space from the adjoining Stables in a trompe-l’oeil effect.
Juvarra had originally designed a rich set of stucco decorations for pilaster strips, recesses and openings like those in the Great Gallery: however they were only partially completed and disappeared in the 19th century.
The Great Stables
The Great Stables once sheltered up to 160 horses: detailed drawings by ancient master carpenters still document the wooden boxes, now lost. The stunning dimensions of this space – much greater than the stables found in other royal residences across Piedmont and comparable only to the construction built by Jean Auber in 1719 in Chantilly for the Great Condé – are testament to the key role that horses played in the sumptuous choreography of the royal hunts and to the ambitions of the commissioning patrons.
The Rooms of the Arts
The rooms on the upper floor of the Reggia had never been open to the public and were by far the most seriously damaged: floors and plasterwork were missing, rainwater dripped in from the cracks in the ceiling and the comprehensive tests that were carried out indicated that subsequent interventions had almost entirely obliterated the historical features of these rooms.
The Monumental Staircase by Piacenza
In 1788, on the occasion of the wedding of Vittorio Emanuele, Duke of Aosta, to Marie Therese of Hapsburg-Este, it was decided to build a new apartment on the first floor of the Palace. It was therefore necessary to build a connecting staircase as well. Designed by the Court Architect Giuseppe Battista Piacenza (1735-1818), the staircase disappears into the facade, adapting to an earlier plan by Michelangelo Garove. This addition, that proved extremely challenging from a structural point of view, also unveiled traces of the mouldings of the cornice on the pre-existing historical facade above the collapsed ceiling of the staircase. A painstaking artistic restoration successfully reinstated the delicate 18th century hues of the marmorino stuccos and plasterwork.
The new staircase
The construction of the new staircase connecting the western Gardens to the new Rooms of the Arts on the Upper Floors and the latter to the ground floor exhibition rooms, is part of a long and complex project to recover the Reggia’s historical and architectural splendour. The staircase unwinds like a steel ribbon and runs along the fracture in the façade of the Palace of Diana facing out towards the Court of Honour, that marks the juncture between the 17th and 18th century portions of the building. Its 120 steps, the landings and the openings are covered in wood coming from original beams recovered from the Reggia and the Castle of Aglié.
The complex and integrated nature of the Reggia does not allow for individual restoration projects: the restoration of the Upper Floors required the renovation of the monumental staircase built in the late 18th century by the architect Piacenza to connect the Court of Honour with the Apartments of the Dukes of Aosta, while the restoration of the rooms on the first floor reveals today an extraordinary and unexpected view of the Gardens.
The Restoration
The nuptial apartment of Vittorio Emanuele, Duke of Aosta, and Marie Therese of Austria-Este was originally built in 1788-89 by the Court Architects Giuseppe Battista Piacenza and Carlo Randoni and followed the neoclassical taste of the time. Renowned wood sculptors – Giuseppe Maria Bonzanigo, Francesco Bolgiè, Biagio Ferrero, Giuseppe Gianotti – also participated in the project. No trace remains today of the original rooms, except for most of the project drawings. Part of the original decorations are found today in other Savoy Residences, while a commode is conserved at the Stupinigi Hunting Lodge.
The restoration works that were recently completed adopted modern technologies to maintain the architectural unity of the apartment and placed emphasis to the remaining original decorations and architectural elements. The restoration works brought to light late 19th-century decorations made by the military that bear witness to the use of the this area as a barracks, and possibly as a meeting room. The decorations mainly consist of military victories, shields, lances and helmets. In partcular a Savoy coat of arms stands out for its flower decorations that are similar to the ones that were discovered in the main court of the Fountain of Neptune in the Borgo Castello of La Mandria. Drawings were discovered in another room depicting dragons against a chequered background pattern.
The Park of La Mandria
The Park, that covers an area of 3,000 hectares, is the largest fenced nature preserve in Europe. Explore the extraordinary natural reserve of the Park of La Mandria and take advantage of a rich program of joint activities also by train and by bus.
In collaboration with Regione Piemonte, Parco Naturale La Mandria – Ente di Gestione delle Aree Protette dell’Area Metropolitana di Torino.
Royal Palace of Venaria
Reggia di Venaria Reale is a former royal residence and gardens located in Venaria Reale, near Turin in the Metropolitan City of Turin of the Piedmont region in northern Italy. With 80,000m² in palace area and over 950.000m² in premises, it is one the largest palaces in the world. It is one of the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy, included in the UNESCO Heritage List in 1997.
Restored to the baroque magnificence to which it was inspired in the mid-1600s by Duke Carlo Emanuele II of Savoy, the Reggia di Venaria is once again a symbol of modernity and culture. Since its opening in 2007, after two centuries of neglect and decay and eight intense years of restoration, La Venaria Reale has become one of Italy’s five most visited cultural sites.
The monumental palace is home to some of the finest examples of universal Baroque: the Hall of Diana designed by Amedeo di Castellamonte, the Great Gallery and the Church of St. Hubert, the grandiose complex of the Juvarra Stables designed by Filippo Juvarra in the 18th century, the sumptuous decorations and spectacular Fountain of the Stag in the Court of Honor are the ideal setting for the Theatre of History and Magnificence, the permanent display devoted to the House of Savoy that takes the visitor down a path that is almost 2,000 m long, from the basement level to the piano nobile of the Reggia.
Seen from above, the Reggia and the Gardens cover a surface of 950,000 square meters of unencumbered architecture and parkland. They lie at the heart of a vast estate that is made up of the Juvarra Stables (a 5,000 sq.m. exhibition centre in the Citroniera and the Great Stables); the Conservation and Restoration Center (housed in the former Alfieri Stables); the Old Town Center, the Borgo Castello and Cascina Rubbianetta (today home to the prestigious International Horse Center) set among the woods and castles that dot the 6,500 hectares of greenery in the nearby Park of La Mandria.
The Gardens appear today as a perfectly balanced combination of ancient and modern elements, in a boundless scenario where archaeological findings and contemporary artworks dialogue in harmony. A complex restoration project has led, over a period of eight years, to the reconstruction of the landscape and its historical landmarks that also took into account modern aesthetics and contemporary needs with important art works by the contemporary masters Giuseppe Penone and Giovanni Anselmo.