Reggia di Venaria

The Construction of the Piedmontese Versailles
The Reggia di Venaria is one of the most successful examples of the 'Crown of Delights', the system of residences designed around Turin in which, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the sovereign lived for about six months a year, during the hottest season.
Visiting the magnificent rooms of the Reggia and strolling through its vast park, you experience an atmosphere suspended between the past and the future. The Venaria Reale was built from 1658 onwards by architect Amedeo di Castellamonte for Charles Emmanuel II. It includes the village, the park and the woods used for hunting. The frescoes decorating the rooms, depicting Scenes of Hellish Hunts and Scenes of Water within bizarre stucco frames, and the paintings by Flemish painter Jan Miel in the great hall dedicated to the goddess Diana, depicting the main types of hunts practised by the duke and his courtiers, also refer to this practice.

From royal to magnificent
Between the end of the 17^th century and the beginning of the 18^th century, Victor Amadeus II transformed the complex from a hunting lodge into a real royal palace, entrusting the works first to Michelangelo Garove and then to the Sicilian Filippo Juvarra, who made Venaria a Baroque jewel. The architect enriched it with the vast spaces of the Great Stable, which could house up to two hundred horses, the Orangerie, intended for the preservation of fruit trees during the winter months, and the Royal Court Chapel (later called St Hubert's Chapel), an evocative Greek-cross room shaped by the light that brings together painting, sculpture and architecture, with altarpieces by great Italian painters (Sebastiano Conca, Francesco Trevisani and Sebastiano Ricci) and marble sculptures by the Tuscan Giovanni Baratta. But Juvarra’s masterpiece was the Galleria Grande (1718-72). 80 metres long, light is the absolute protagonist in the gallery. It filters through the windows on both sides and through the open oculi in of the vault, making the rich stucco decorations come alive in a constant and changing play of light and shadow. The Palace was then completed by Benedetto Alfieri, to whom we owe the new stables and the connecting galleries between the Juvarra sections.
Throughout the 18^th century, Venaria was the main theatre of political power and artistic magnificence of the House of Savoy.

Transformation into military barracks
In the 19^th century, its furnishings were removed, and it was turned into a barrack, which was gradually left to decay.
The largest restoration site in the European Union
Since 1997, it has been the object of a pioneering and demanding restoration project, which allowed it to be opened again to the public in 2007 as part of a visitor route, which is enriched every year by important international exhibitions of old and modern art.

The 'most beautiful park in Italy’
The dialogue between the memory of the past and the contemporary world also continues in its extensive gardens, which in 2019 won the 'Most Beautiful Park in Italy'. Here you can admire contemporary art exhibitions, the fluid sculptures garden by Giuseppe Penone, the installations by Giovanni Anselmo and Mimmo Paladino, and the Hercules Fountain complex, a 17^th-century masterpiece by Amedeo di Castellamonte.