A vineyard with a royal palace inside it, on the hill above the Gran Madre: Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy had it built from 1615 to designs by Vitozzi and the Castellamontes to keep away from the court with his academicians, then renounced the purple and in 1642, at forty-nine, married his niece Ludovica, who was fourteen, and lived here with her until his death. In the eighteenth century it became the villa of the queens, Anne Marie of Orléans and Polyxena of Hesse, who had it remade by Juvarra and spent September here; Napoleon slept here; the Savoys gave it in 1868 to a college for the daughters of soldiers, the bombs broke it open, and for fifty years the ivy ate it. Reopened in 2007 after a restoration that removed four hundred thousand cubic metres of brambles, it is a vineyard again, and makes wine.
What to see
The garden, before the villa: you climb from the Gran Rondeau, the elliptical terrace with the fountain of Neptune and the river gods, by the pincer staircase up to the façade, and behind the palace opens the amphitheatre dug into the hill, three terraces of box, the exedra with the twenty niches and the statues, the Grotto of the Wild King with its marbles and coloured stones, the staircase climbing between the little cascades to the Belvedere at the top, with all Turin in front and the Alps behind. At the sides, the Pavilion of the Solinghi, where the cardinal gathered his academy, and the rows of the vineyard.
Inside, the hall with the quadratura and the eighteenth-century frescoes by Crosato, Dallamano, Beaumont, Seiter, partly lost in the war, and the four Chinese Cabinets, little rooms of gilded lacquer and oriental panels that are the rarest piece of the villa; the apartments of the king and queen remade by Juvarra, with the stuccoes and the surviving panelling. The celebrated Piffetti bookcase was taken to the Quirinale, like much of the furniture; the rest you look at knowing it came back from nothing.
Visiting
The villa is on Strada Santa Margherita, ten minutes' walk uphill from the Gran Madre, beyond the Vittorio Emanuele bridge, or by bus; a state museum, closed on Mondays, with its own ticket and the Torino card, since 1997 in the UNESCO site of the Savoy Residences. The garden is visited with the same ticket; two hours, and in September, with the harvest, the vineyard is the reason to come.
Our editors' tip
Climb to the very top, to the Belvedere, before entering the palace: from there the villa is understood as the Castellamontes wanted it, an axis of water and stairs descending from the hill to the city, with the Mole at the end that was not there then. Then ask about the wine: the freisa of the royal vineyard is bought at the villa, from an urban vineyard inside a World Heritage Site, perhaps the only one in the world.