Villa della Regina

Perched on the Turin hillside and overlooking the city centre, Villa della Regina is a veritable scenic backdrop to Turin, surrounded by evocative Italian-style gardens with water features, grottoes and newly productive agricultural areas. Its name originates from its predominantly female purpose: this residence was used by the Savoy queens, who fashioned the place according to their refined tastes. Established in around 1615 as a vineyard, a hillside residence which belonged to Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, the property then passed to his young niece, Princess Ludovica Cristina, whom he married in 1642 after setting aside his cardinal’s robes.
With the passage to Anne Marie d’Orléans, consort of Vittorio Amedeo II, important renovation work began on the building: in 1713, the couple acquired the royal title, the residence was named Vigna della Regina and was radically transformed to the designs by the new court architect Filippo Juvarra. In the rooms on the piano nobile, divided into a apartment for the queen and one for the king, elegant white stucco ceilings embellished with paintings by the painter Claudio Francesco Beaumont were created.
From the 1730s onwards, Juvarra’s plans for Villa della Regina were taken over by his pupil, Giovanni Pietro Baroni di Tavigliano. It is to this phase that we owe the realisation of the large entrance hall to the Villa, frescoed by painters Giuseppe Dallamano, Giambattista Crosato and Corrado Giaquinto. In those same years, the four small drawing rooms located in the corner towers were decorated and furnished with Chinese-style objects in keeping with the taste for the Orient that was in vogue at the 18th-century European courts..
From 1865, the villa ceased to be a court residence and became the seat of the National Institute of the Daughters of Servicemen. The spaces were used as classrooms for the school’s lessons, reception rooms for visiting dignitaries, and bedrooms for the headmistress and teaching staff. Some of the original furnishings were transported by the House of Savoy to Rome, to furnish the rooms of the Quirinal Palace: the panels that decorated one of the Chinese drawing rooms, the library crafted by the famous cabinet-maker Pietro Piffetti for Carlo Emanuele III, the canvases by Corrado Giaquinto featuring the cycle of the Stories of Aeneas.
Further impoverishment, particularly in the Queen’s Apartment, was caused by the bombings of 1942-1943 and the theft in 1979, following the abolition of the National Institute of the Daughters of Servicemen in 1975.
The rebirth of Villa della Regina, which began in 1994 thanks to intervention by the Superintendency and by public and private organisations and institutions, was made possible by a pioneering restoration and study project. In 2008, the reopening to the public was celebrated with the first grape harvest from the vineyard replanted on the hillside.