Palazzo Madama, two thousand years of history in one building

At the centre of Piazza Castello, Palazzo Madama looks like a building with two souls: a bright baroque façade facing Via Garibaldi and, at the back, medieval brick towers. This double identity is the key to understanding why Turin tradition regards it as a threshold, suspended between different ages. Few monuments in Europe contain in a single body two thousand years of urban history, from the Roman city to the birth of the Italian Parliament.

From Roman gate to castle

The oldest core of the building is the eastern gate of Augusta Taurinorum, the Roman colony founded in the first century BC. For the Romans city gates had a value that was not only military but also religious: they marked the boundary between the ordered space of the city and the outside world, and were placed under the protection of tutelary deities. The bases of that gate can still be read in the palace's structures.

In the Middle Ages the gate was absorbed into a fortification, later transformed into a castle. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Prince Louis of Savoy-Acaja made it a lordly residence, with corner towers and an inner courtyard. From then on the building was long known simply as the castle, and the square around it has kept that name to this day.

The Madame Reali

The present name derives from two women who lived there in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Christine of France, widow of Victor Amadeus I and regent of the duchy, and Marie Jeanne Baptiste of Savoy-Nemours, widow of Charles Emmanuel II. Both bore the title of Madama Reale and made the palace a centre of court life, artistic patronage and political intrigue.

It was at the wish of Marie Jeanne Baptiste that Filippo Juvarra, the court architect, designed between 1718 and 1721 the grand façade with its ceremonial staircase. The complete project, which envisaged rebuilding the whole edifice, was never carried out, which is why the palace still shows the contrast between its baroque and medieval parts. Over time, popular rumours of night-time presences have joined the court stories, like those that accompany many old castles.

The sky above the palace

A lesser-known chapter concerns astronomy. In the nineteenth century the astronomical observatory of Turin operated on one of the towers, linked to the figure of Giovanni Plana, a mathematician and astronomer of European renown. From here stars were observed and precision calculations made, in a building that popular tradition associated rather with mysteries. The observatory was later moved out of the city, to the hill of Pino Torinese, in the twentieth century.

In 1848 the palace housed the Senate of the Kingdom of Sardinia, established by the Statuto Albertino, and later the first Senate of the Kingdom of Italy. Today it is home to the Civic Museum of Ancient Art, which holds masterpieces such as Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Man, dated 1476, as well as illuminated manuscripts, goldsmiths' work, glass and ceramics of great value.

Palazzo Madama is thus a true palimpsest in stone. Sacred gate of the Roman city, medieval castle, residence of regents, observatory, parliamentary chamber and museum: every age has left a visible mark on it. More than from mysterious presences, the charm of the place arises from this layering of times, which visitors can cross by passing from one room to the next.