The Baroque façade of Palazzo Reale, a Savoy residence for three centuries, overlooks piazzetta Reale by piazza Castello in Turin.
When Emanuel Philibert of Savoy moved here in the late 1500s, it was a bishop’s palace whose redesign was entrusted to Ascanio Vittozzi. After 1643, supervision of the work was given to Amedeo di Castellamonte and later Carlo Morello; while furnishing of the first-floor rooms with inlaid gilded ceilings and large canvases depicting allegories by Jan Miel and Charles Dauphin continued.
In 1688 Daniel Seyter was called from Rome to fresco the gallery that has since been known as “del Daniel”. With Bartolomeo Guidobono of Genoa, Seyter also worked on Madam Felicity’s apartment on the ground floor. Towards the end of the 1600s, the garden behind the building was redesigned and extended by the famous French architect, André Le Notre.
In 1713, during the reign of Victor Amadeus II, the so-called “command zone” annexed to the palace, included secretarial rooms, offices, Teatro Regio and the State Archives. Filippo Juvarra was behind the design and he also created the Scala delle Forbici and the Chinese Cabinet. He was followed by Benedetto Alfieri who chose the decoration of the second-floor apartments and furnished the new Archive rooms, frescoed by Francesco De Mura and Gregorio Guglielmi.
During the reign of Charles Albert (1831-1849), Pelagio Palagi supervised the renovation of the library, the Salone degli Svizzeri and Sala del Consiglio; in 1862 a new staircase was built.
When the capital was transferred from Turin to Florence, the palace gradually lost its residents. From 1955 it was transferred to the care of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici and is today part of the Royal Museums. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Royal Savoy Residences series in 1997.
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