La Bizzarrìa is a hunting lodge that Victor Emmanuel II had built around 1860 inside what is now the La Mandria nature park. The name comes from the architecture, eclectic and fanciful to an extreme. The king wanted it also as a residence for himself, for Rosa Vercellana, known as la Bela Rosin, and for their two children Vittoria and Emanuele.
What to see
The plan is triangular, with three cylindrical towers at the corners forming a hexagonal room once repeated on three levels. You go up by two elliptical staircases, or by a double semicircular flight that leads to the terrace: from there, through the porticoes of the projecting central body and of the turrets, you enter the main hall. Inside and out there are ramage and trompe-l'oeil frescoes.
Visiting
The building went up between 1861 and 1862, by the firm of the Ticinese architect Leopoldo Galli, who in those years was running the entire estate site: the boundary wall, the roads, the bridges, the service and guard buildings. The same plan included a second hunting reposoir, the Villa dei Laghi, raised in the same years beside an artificial lake.
Our editors' tip
The restoration is the most interesting part. Abandonment had brought the vaults down one onto the other, leaving a single central space; between 1975 and 1981 Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola did not rebuild it but kept it that way. Outside and in the perimeter rooms the reconstruction is philological; at the centre the two missing vaults are marked by rings of mirror on light panels, and the light that comes through multiplies the images like a kaleidoscope.