The display titled Theater of Magnificence with a grand walk through the apartments of the Duke and the Duchess of Savoy, the apartments of the King and the Queen, the Great Gallery, the Alfieri Rotunda and the Church of St. Hubert. This was the “ceremonial route” that characterized the 18th century Palace and that today’s visitors are invited to discover, gaining access to the vast spaces of the Reggia and admiring its unique architecture.
More than 500 artworks including paintings, sculptures, tapestry, furniture, chandeliers, carpets, banners, silverware, snuffboxes, clocks and musical instruments – some of them true masterpieces – hint at the original furnishings and recreate the ancient court atmosphere and the style of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Juvarra’s Great Stables with the Bucentaur mark the end of the permanent display of the Reggia. Restored architectural details, unexpected and breathtaking views, vast spaces, tapestries and historical references: once again, the visitors are invited to step into the magical atmosphere of life at Court for an extraordinary journey through the culture and leisure pursuits of today and of yore.
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.
The Royal Residences of the House of Savoy
Turin is home to a number of Castles and Royal Palaces of remarkable historical and artistic value, which are part of an architectural and urban design plan intended to create an ideal frame around the city. They are known collectively as the Crown of Delights of the House of Savoy, a definition dating back to the time when they were built, between the 16th and the 17th century, indicating a group of leisure estates that doubled as centers of power and territorial control for the rulers.
The Crown of Delights consisted of around fifteen majestic palaces comprising gardens and artworks to compete for beauty and grandiosity with the most opulent European royal residences of the time. Some of them were gradually abandoned and would eventually disappeared, as was the case with the Regio Parco and the Castle of Mirafiori, but luckily most of them are still in place today and have become part of our common heritage and of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites.
The most grandiose and famous is La Venaria Reale, a monumental complex dating back to the mid-17th century. The estate consists of an 80,000 sq.m. Palace, 60 hectares of gardens, 3,000 hectares of fenced and protected parkland (the Park of La Mandria) and the adjoining Old Town. Together they make up a single architectural and environmental continuum that offers a shiny example of European Baroque.
In addition to La Venaria, other important Royal Residences include the imposing Castle of Moncalieri on the Turin hillside, and the Stupinigi Hunting Lodge in the vicinity, another extraordinary example of artistic complexity finely decorated by the brilliant architect Filippo Juvarra. Other remarkable gems are the historical Castle of Agliè in the Canavese area, and the Castle of La Mandria, near the Reggia di Venaria, with their parks and collections, that provide illustrations of historical events at different points in time all the way to the 20th century.
Today the Royal Residences of the House of Savoy have come together as a novel, unique, unmissable “exotic destination” in Italy offering a cultural experience that is different and constantly renewed: a visit that requires at least a weekend to truly appreciate their natural and historical beauty, accompanied by the local delicacies that abound in these areas.
Theater of History and Magnificence
The permanent display of the Reggia, titled Theater of History and Magnificence, is a journey through the history and the art of the House of Savoy that takes visitors on a 2,000-meter walk from the ground floor to the piano nobile of the Royal Palace. The visit begins in the imposing 17th century Hall of Diana and continues through the elegant Great Gallery to a music soundtrack composed by Brian Eno, the solemn Church of St. Hubert, the 18th century architectural masterpieces by Filippo Juvarra and their sumptuous stucco decorations, and Peopling the Palaces – a series of evocative multimedia installations by Peter Greenaway on court life.
In the destiny of Venaria there is a time for splendor and prosperity and a time for neglect, decline and the scattering of all its furnishings. The identity of this place is characterized first by a process of amassing, followed by subtraction. Over the past decade the restoration project retraced and recreated the ancient layout of the Gardens and revived the imposing spaces and the grand architecture of the Palace, while the artistic collection and the furnishings remain inexorably scant, denied by the events of history. The ancient paths to infinity and the unearthed ruins of the Gardens were reinstated with new plants and enriched by contemporary artworks: the extraordinary views of the Reggia and what remains of its original decorations were redesigned as a Theater of Magnificence to narrate ancient and modern tales and to experience the glorious past.
The display is a presentation of the dynasty that conceived and expanded the Reggia. Historical figures and members of the Court – created by the artistic genius of Peter Greenaway – will accompany the visitor also on the Piano Nobile, across the faithfully recreated 17th century rooms of the original hunting estate and the Palace of Kings, all the way to the ceremonial route of the18th century. In this way the visitors will be able to truly experience this ancient and extraordinary Palace as their own, in the best possible sense.
The King’s Paintings
In three elegant rooms of the 17th century Apartment of Princess Ludovica, next to the Hall of Diana, a display presents prestigious 16th and 17th century artworks on loan from the Galleria Sabauda of the Polo Reale of Turin.
27 precious paintings by celebrated artists (from Guido Reni to Guercino, from Rubens to van Dyck, Brueghel the Elder and Brueghel the Younger) make up an elegant display that is a tribute to the superb “picture gallery” of the Reggia, the art collection of the sovereigns of Savoy.
The Fine Arts
From the permanent collection and deposits of the Picture Gallery of Turin’s Accademia Albertina, the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts.
The display provides a new and evocative setting for canvases and sculptures that illustrate four centuries of “artistic knowledge” (from the 16th to the 20th century) and also serves to underscore the importance of the learning process to acquire a variety of artistic skills through direct contact with masterpieces of the past.
The Atelier of The Arts, the new space on the upper floors of the Palace of Diana devoted to this exhibition, also boasts a very special guest star: the great master Paolo Veronese with two extraordinary paintings recently attributed to him that reflect the display’s key themes, namely Allegory with an armillary sphere, and Allegory of Sculpture.
The Royal Stables
Juvarra’s Stables, marking the end of the Reggia’s permanent display, are one of Venaria’s most imposing spaces and a superb example of European Baroque architecture.
The Stables are home to the splendid Bucentaur commissioned by Vittorio Amedeo II between 1729 and 1731 and crafted in Venice, the only remaining of its kind. Today it is presented in a brand new staging that incudes videos, lights and music, and the boat is “armed” in full with mast, oars and sails.
Also on show are some of the most sumptuous ceremonial carriages used by the House of Savoy in the early 19th century. These include the golden Berlin, on loan from Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome.
The Bucentaur and the Carriages are presented together as part of the activities hosted in the Royal Stables that concerned the travels of the Sovereign and his train.They make up a permanent display that is exceptional for the value of the pieces shown in a modern and extraordinarily powerful staging, and for the unique insights that they provide into the history of the Reggia, its territory and the Royal House that ruled over it and their times.
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.