In 1978, when the palace passed to the heritage authority, it was a wreck: from 1851 to 1943 it had served as barracks and cavalry school, and once the army left, vandalism and slow neglect did the rest. It took Federico Zeri, on a television programme, to show Italians what had become of the hunting residence that Charles Emmanuel II had begun in 1659 to a design by Amedeo di Castellamonte. The name comes from the Latin Venatio Regia, royal hunt: the duke wanted a base for working the game-filled woods north of Turin. Since 1997 the complex has been part of the UNESCO site of the Savoy Residences.
What to see
The centrepiece is the Great Gallery, the wing Filippo Juvarra finished from 1716 after Michelangelo Garove died leaving it unbuilt: a long file of tall windows and white stucco in which the marble carries the whole play of light. Beside it stands the chapel of Sant'Uberto, also by Juvarra, dedicated to the patron saint of hunters. The seventeenth-century core is Castellamonte's Palace of Diana, the central block meant for the duke and his court, raised floor by floor up to the belvedere. Juvarra also signed the orangery and the Great Stable, and in the mid-eighteenth century Benedetto Alfieri pulled down the clock tower to rebuild it where it stood, adding the Belvedere wing.
Outside there are 800,000 square metres of gardens and woods, redrawn in the French manner by Garove on the Versailles model: the Royal Alley, the English Garden, the Fountain of Hercules. The Temple of Diana was demolished in stages in the early eighteenth century and Juvarra put a labyrinth in its place. The complex does not stop at the gate: the palace was conceived together with its town, laid out on a circular plan copying the collar of the Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, and it takes in the park of La Mandria with its castle. In 2019 the garden was voted the finest public park in Italy.
Visiting
Venaria Reale sits north of Turin: from the city centre it is under half an hour by bus or train, and the station is a short walk from the entrance. Tickets are modular, covering palace, gardens, exhibitions and the park of La Mandria, so decide in advance how much walking you want: the run of state rooms alone takes a good two hours, and the gardens as much again. The restoration behind all this ran eight years, from 1999 to 2007, and cost more than 300 million euros, the largest project of its kind ever undertaken in Europe. The palace reopened to the public on 13 October 2007 and counted 1,048,834 visitors in 2018.
Our editors' tip
We go in during the early afternoon and save the Great Gallery for last: as the sun swings west the light comes in sideways through the tall windows and the white stucco stops being white. Then we walk out into the gardens and let La Mandria go, because it is a separate outing and deserves its own day. If you are travelling with children, a run down the Royal Alley pays off better than any of the rooms.
