In 1563 Duke Emanuele Filiberto established the capital of the Savoy duchy in Turin, setting up the court in the city’s ancient bishop’s palace. In 1584, at the behest of Carlo Emanuele I, the architect Ascanio Vitozzi was entrusted with the project for the construction of a new palace and in the years following 1643 the direction of the works passed to Amedeo di Castellamonte and then again to Carlo Morello.
Jan Miel and Charles Dauphin embellished the rooms on the first floor with carved ceilings and large allegorical paintings glorifying the virtues of the sovereign.
In 1688, Daniel Seyter was called from Rome to fresco the sumptuous gallery overlooking the gardens, and collaborated with the Genoese Bartolomeo Guidobono in the apartments on the ground floor. When Victor Amadeus II gained the royal title (1713), he entrusted Filippo Juvarra with the creation of the “Command Area” consisting of the Secretariats, the Regio Theatre and the State Archives. The position of first royal architect then passed to Benedetto Alfieri, who designed the decorative apparatus of the second floor and set up the new rooms of the Palazzo degli Archivi, frescoed by Francesco De Mura and Gregorio Guglielmi.
During Charles Albert’s reign (1831-1849) many rooms were radically renovated under the direction of Pelagio Palagi, and the new Staircase of Honour was built in 1862. With the transfer of the capital from Turin to Florence (1864) and then to Rome, the palace gradually lost its functions as a residence and with the birth of the Italian Republic (1946) it became a State property.
THE COLLECTION
VISIT THE ROYAL PALACE’S COLLECTION
Royal Palace in pictures
Visit other sections of the museum complex
