OPENING HOURS
| To find out about any changes in real time please visit: Organizza la tua visita – Musei Reali Torino (beniculturali.it) |
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Mon – Fri: 9 a.m. – 6.30 p.m. ; Free entry
Mon, Tue, Wed: 8.30 a.m. – 6.30 p.m., Thu, Fri: 8.30 a.m. – 3.15 p.m., Sat: 8.30 a.m. – 1.30 p.m.
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Waiting for the next exhibition on March 2023. Follow us for further information |
BOOKING
Online booking is not mandatory but strongly recommended.
e-mail: prenotazioni@coopculture.it
tel: +39 011 19560449
Group booking: tour@coopculture.it
School booking: info.torino@coopculture.it
Maximum 25 people per group or school class, apart from leaders and guides.
NOTICES
Full price € 15, € 2 from 18 to 25 years, free under 18, visitors with disabilities and accompanying caregiver, teachers with school groups, staff of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage – owners of an Abbonamento Musei or Torino+Piemonte Card or ICOM Card
The Ministry guidelines for reductions on the admission are available on the website: www.beniculturali.it
USEFUL TIPS
The average length of a visit to the Museums is about 4 hours, so it is recommended to purchase your ticket well in advance of the closing time of the museum. In order to overview the spaces and better organize your visit to the Royal Museums, a map of the spaces is available. Explore 3D experience – Musei Reali Torino
The collections of the Royal Museums are vulnerable, so we ask our visitors not to touch the works and not to eat and drink in the exhibition halls.
For the same reason, it is possible to take photographs for personal use in all rooms, but without using flash and tripods. Please contact the Royal Museums mr-to@beniculturali.it for photographs for commercial use.
It is not possible to bring animals into the museums, except in the gardens where dogs are allowed only if muzzled and on a leash, and with the exception of accompanying dogs for people with disabilities.
Bicycles are not allowed within the Court of Honor and the Royal Gardens. There is a bike rack reserved for visitors near the ticket office.
FACILITIES FOR OUR VISITORS
CAFETERIA
The Cafeteria has its entrance from the Court of Honor of the Royal Palace and is located in the old rooms of the Servizio Frutteria, a place dedicated to the preservation of fine porcelain since the eighteenth century. The Cafeteria offers to the visitors a moment of refreshment, even at lunchtime, in a unique and elegant setting, among the objects of the Savoy collections. It is possible to organize events in the spaces of the Cafeteria.
PETS
PETS are not allowed to enter the museum, but for their care during the visit you can use the Bauadvisor service by booking directly from the website Il mondo a sei zampe (bauadvisor.it).
ACCESSIBILITY ENTRANCE TO THE ROYAL MUSEUMS
Entrance to the Royal Gardens. The entrance to the Gardens through the Court of Honor of the Royal Palace is barrier-free.
Entrance to the Royal Library .The entrance to the Library from Piazza Castello 191 is equipped with a wheelchair accessible fixed ramp and a mobile ramp, activated by the reception staff.
Entrance to Chiablese Hall. The access to temporary exhibitions, housed on the ground floor of Palazzo Chiablese, is barrier-free.
Entrance to the Sabauda Gallery and Museum of Antiquities. At the moment, visitors can only access the exhibition route from the Royal Gardens and it is barrier-free.
ACCESSIBILITY TO THE EXHIBITION ROUTE
ACCESSIBILITY TO RESTROOMS
ROYAL PALACE
In 1563, Turin became capital of the dukedom, and in 1584 Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy commissioned Ascanio Vitozzi to build a new palace. After 1643, the direction of the work passed to Amedeo di Castellamonte and then 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 Vittorio Amedeo II gained the royal title (1713), he entrusted Filippo Juvarra with the creation of the “Command Area” consisting of the Secretariats, the Royal 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 Archives, frescoed by Francesco De Mura and Gregorio Guglielmi.
During Carlo Alberto’s reign (1831-1849) many rooms were radically renovated under the direction of Pelagio Palagi, and the new grand staircase was realised 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.
ROYAL ARMORY
The armory was set up by Charles Albert and inaugurated in 1837. It is located in the magnificent Queen’s Gallery, decorated between 1738 and 1742 by court painter Claudio Francesco Beaumont. The creation of the museum is due to Vittorio Seyssel D’Aix, artillery captain and first director of the armory, who gathered works from the arsenals of Turin and Genoa, from collections of antiquities, and from prestigious collections purchased on the antiques market, such as the collection of Alessandro Sanquirico (1833) from Milan and the collection of the Martinengo della Fabbrica (1839) from Brescia. In 1842, an expansion of the museum took place in the Rotunda designed by Pelagio Palagi. This space was conceived to house more recent collections, such as the Oriental arms collection. With the advent of the Republic in 1946, the Armory, until then under the Ministry of the Royal Household, became a state museum. The collection has more than five thousand works ranging from Prehistory to the early 20th century and includes the Royal Medal Collection, with more than 60,000 pieces including ancient and modern coins, medals and seals.
ROYAL LIBRARY
The Royal Library stores over 200,000 volumes, antique papers, engravings and illuminated manuscripts, the result of the enrichment of the collection decided in 1831 by Charles Albert of Savoy-Carignano. In 1839, with the purchase of Giovanni Volpato’s collection, a valuable nucleus of drawings by Italian and foreign great masters became part of the collections, including 13 autograph sheets by Leonardo da Vinci, to which the famous Codex on the Flight of Birds was later added. The increase in funds determined the construction of the new site on the ground floor of the East Wing of the Royal Palace. It was inaugurated in 1942 and conceived by court architect Pelagio Palagi, with the design of monumental furnishings arranged on two levels. After World War II, with the transfer of the property from the House of Savoy to the Italian State, the Royal Library became a public library.
CHAPEL OF THE HOLY SHROUD
It was built to house the linen cloth imprinted with the image that Christians identify with the deposed Christ. The famous relic, owned by the Savoy family since 1453, is now kept in a special shrine at the end of the left aisle of the cathedral. The construction work, which began in 1607, received a decisive boost with the arrival of architect Guarino Guarini, a Theatine father, distinguished mathematician and one of the greatest protagonists of European Baroque. Hired in Turin in 1666, Guarini conceived a structure that defied every canon of architecture, inserting on the pre-existing cylindrical body a new volume consisting of three large arches sloping inward. The tambour is lightened by six tall windows alternating with pillars with recesses, and the dome is conceived as a daring tower-reliquary, a spectacular diaphanous architecture with six levels of overlapping and staggered arches that converge in the star-sun placed at the apex, where the dove of the Holy Spirit stands out. The Chapel’s elevation, in the interweaving of its different elements, in the attention to decorative and symbolic details, in the importance given to the contribution of light, has no terms of comparison in Western architecture. The construction was completed under Guarini’s direction until his death in 1683. In 1694 the Shroud was moved to the imposing double central altar designed by Antonio Bertola, where it remained until 1993, when it was placed in the cathedral. Following an extensive fire that broke out on the night of April 11-12, 1997, the Shroud Chapel underwent a complex restoration until it was reopened to the public on September 27, 2018.
SABAUDA GALLERY
Initially set up in the Palazzo Madama, the Gallery was established by King Carlo Alberto on October 2, 1832 on his birthday. It featured a collection of paintings belonging to the Savoy dukes and kings, collected since the late 16th century, from the family residences and the Genoese palace of the Durazzo family. In 1860, King Vittorio Emanuele II donated the entire collection to the Italian state, and in 1865 the Gallery was moved to its new home in the Nobili Palace in Via Accademia delle Scienze, where it remained until 2014, when it was moved to its current location. Enriched with important acquisitions, particularly works by Italian Renaissance masters and early Flemish and, in 1930, by the collection of industrialist Riccardo Gualino, the picture gallery now displays more than 800 works. On the ground floor is the section devoted to Piedmonts’ masters of the Renaissance. On the first floor are Italian and international collections from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, with important masters such as Beato Angelico, Mantegna, Veronese, Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Rubens, and Van Dyck. Finally, on the second floor, are works from the 17th to the 19th centuries, including the famous views of Turin painted by Bernardo Bellotto. Of great interest is the nucleus of Flemish and Dutch paintings from the collection of Prince Eugene of Savoy-Soissons.
MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES
The origin of Turin’s archaeological collections dates back to the acquisition campaigns promoted by Emanuele Filiberto and his son Carlo Emanuele I between the 16th and 17th centuries to bring together a prestigious nucleus of ancient sculptures and reliefs in Turin. In 1723, demolitions in the center of Turin brought to light numerous vestiges of ancient Augusta Taurinorum, and important archaeological evidence was added to the original nucleus of the Savoy collection. The enrichment continued during the 19th century, partly due to the spread of archaeological research and the activities of international diplomats and chancelleries. Territorial research has been the main vector for the enrichment of the archaeological heritage in the 20th and 21st centuries, although there has been no lack of donations or acquisitions that embellish the collections that are now part of the Royal Museums.
The museum is divided into three sections. In the Archaeological Gallery are the historical collections; in the basement of the New Wing, adjacent to the ruins of the Roman theatre, is the Archaeology section of Turin. Finally, is the Piedmont Territory Pavilion, housed since 1998 in a luminous hypogeic space linking the New Wing and the greenhouses of the Royal Palace, with an articulate repertoire of archaeological evidence ranging from Prehistory to the Late Middle Ages.
ROYAL GARDENS
The Royal Gardens are a green area of extraordinary monumental and environmental value. They cover a total area of about seven hectares, bordered on the north and east by the bastions of the ancient city walls, and on the south and west by the Royal Palace and its adjoining buildings. The first sector is the Ducal Garden, a regular-shaped space characterized by the presence of a modern gushing fountain. Following the perimeter of the ancient city wall is the Green Bastion, a small pavilion recognizable by its characteristic sloping roof, overlooking the Grove with its 19th-century layout, which houses the installation “Pietre Preziose” (Precious Stones) by artist Giulio Paolini. The largest sector of the Royal Gardens is the Eastern Garden, which structure is based on a system of avenues that create scenic perspectives. A central axis is enclosed by tree-lined paths, generating a spectacular vanishing point toward the Fountain of the Tritons and the Nereid, created around 1757 by sculptor Simone Martinez. The trees surrounding the Eastern Garden include plane trees, lime trees, and horse chestnuts, while a rare pendulous beech tree, among the oldest and most majestic in Piedmont, stands in the centre of the southern parterre since the second half of the 19th century.
CHIABLESE HALLS
They are located on the ground floor of the palace of the same name and consist of a succession of rooms with an entrance from the Piazzetta Reale. Their current appearance dates back to 1753, when Duke Carlo Emanuele III entrusted Benedetto Alfieri with the task of reshaping the building to serve as the residence of his son, Benedetto Maria Maurizio, duke of Chiablese, and as headquarters of the court offices. In 2013, the rooms were restored and repurposed to house exhibition spaces.