Palace of Venaria

Listen first to the gravel. It crunches under every step as you cross the wide courtyard, and somewhere ahead, water is moving. The air smells faintly of cut grass and old stone. Above you, long pale façades stretch out in both directions, so far that the eye has to travel to take them in. This is the Palace of Venaria, the great country residence of the House of Savoy, on the northwestern edge of Turin.

The name gives away its first purpose. Venaria comes from the Latin word for hunting, and Reale means royal. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Duke Charles Emmanuel the Second wanted a place to hunt in the forests and meadows outside his capital. The Savoy family ruled Piedmont, the region around Turin, and later they would become the kings of a united Italy. This palace was built to show that power, even at play.

The first architect was Amedeo di Castellamonte, who worked for the Savoy court on several projects. He did not design a single building. He designed a whole setting: the palace, its gardens, and a small town in front of it, all laid out along one long axis. Today the main street of the town still runs straight toward the palace gates. If you walked in that way, you followed the same line the duke's guests once followed.

There is a story about that town plan. It is often said that the streets and squares were drawn in the shape of the chain and pendant of the Order of the Annunciation, the highest chivalric order of the Savoy dynasty. Whether the designer truly intended this, or whether later admirers saw the shape afterwards, is hard to know. But it tells you how carefully everything here was arranged, from the first doorway to the far end of the gardens.

The hunting theme runs through the decoration. In Castellamonte's original rooms, paintings and stucco show Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, along with scenes of horses, hounds, and stags. The court here did not hunt for food. The hunt was a ritual, with music, costume, and strict rules of rank. The palace was its stage, and the rooms were built to welcome the company when the chase was over.

The palace did not stay as Castellamonte left it. Over the following decades, other architects extended and remodelled it, and parts of the early building were damaged during the wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Then, in the eighteenth century, the Savoy court brought in Filippo Juvarra, a Sicilian-born architect who reshaped much of Turin. His work here is the reason many visitors come at all.

The first of his masterpieces is the Great Gallery. When you step inside, the effect is mostly light. Tall windows open on both sides, so the sun falls across the floor from left and right at once. The walls and the curved ceiling are covered in white stucco, and the floor is laid in a pattern of pale and dark stone squares. There is very little colour. Juvarra let the daylight do the decorating, and it changes from hour to hour.

Here is something many people miss. Stand at one end of the gallery and look at the other. The long, regular rhythm of windows and arches pulls your eye forward, and the space feels even longer than it is. Then turn and look at the ceiling openings and the carved shells and garlands near the top. Up close, the decoration is rich. From a distance, it melts into one calm white surface.

Juvarra's second great work here is the Chapel of Saint Hubert. Saint Hubert is the patron saint of hunters, so the choice fits the palace perfectly. The chapel rises high, with a central space crowned by a dome, and the light comes from above. Large statues and an elaborate altar fill the interior. It feels less like a private family chapel and more like a small church built for a court.

Later in the eighteenth century, the architect Benedetto Alfieri added more buildings, including the vast stables and the citrus house, where lemon and orange trees were kept warm through the Piedmont winter. These were working buildings, but they were built on a grand scale. Today some of these spaces hold exhibitions, and their long vaulted halls show how seriously the Savoy took horses and gardens alike.

Then came a long decline, and this is the second surprise. After the French occupation at the turn of the nineteenth century, the palace was turned to military use. For many decades it served as barracks. Soldiers lived in the royal apartments, and the formal gardens disappeared under parade grounds and fields. By the twentieth century, much of the complex was in poor condition, and few people outside the region thought of it at all.

The revival came late. A major restoration project worked on the buildings and gardens for years, and the palace reopened to the public in 2007. The gardens were rebuilt with long avenues, lawns, and water, and contemporary art now sits among them, including works by the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone. In 1997, before the restoration was finished, the palace had already been listed by UNESCO among the residences of the royal House of Savoy.

Now come back to where you are standing. Notice the water again, perhaps from the fountain in the main courtyard. Notice how the windows line up, how the paths lead the eye outward toward the gardens and the hills beyond. As you walk away, look once more along that long axis toward the town. You are walking a line drawn more than three centuries ago, and it still leads you exactly where its designer intended.