Eclecticism at the Savoy Court in Turin: Landscape, Architectures and Apartments from late Neoclassicism to Neo-Baroque (1831-1900)

In 1831, the king Carlo Felice died without male heirs, so the lateral branch of the Savoy family, the Princes of Carignano succeeded on the throne. The new king immediately decided to refresh the interior decoration of the Royal Palace in Turin. He promoted the expansion of his castle of Racconigi and the transformation of the castle of Pollenzo. In 1832 he appointed Pelagio Palagi from Milan as painter in charge of the decoration of the Royal Palaces. For more than two decades Palagi was the director of the transformation of the “environment” of the Savoy Court. He balanced Neoclassicism and Neogothic, updating the ancient halls of the Royal Palace in Turin (destroying baroque decorations partly as well as the recent neoclassical apartments). In the countryside his intervention took place on every scale: apartments and furniture, architecture and landscape. In Racconigi - thanks to Palagi - the king had new neoclassical rooms, the neogothic complex of the Margherie (stables, orangery, chapel, conservatory, the Queen’s reposoir) and, finally, the expansion of the landscape garden. The complex of Pollenzo was the most ambitious program: the ancient medieval castle was restored and expanded, surrounded by a new “medieval” village and a great park as a sort of “troubadour” dream. Carlo Alberto’s son, Vittorio Emanuele II, king after 1849, updated the court to the international historicism thanks to Domenico Ferri, a stage designer in Paris. In 1852, Ferri designed the new royal apartment in the castle of Moncalieri, a mixture of Baroque, Rococo and Mannerist Revival style, and – about ten years later – the new façade of the Royal Palace (not executed), the new staircase and the new seat of the Italian Parliament in Turin. In 1861, the peninsula became the kingdom of Italy under the Savoy rule. Therefore the city, now the new capital of the nation, needed new symbols. Ferri continued in using a mixture of Late Baroque and Mannerism, both Piedmontese and French, and thus was sometimes criticized for these “foreign” features. A third chapter starts in the end of nineteenth century. After moving the capital from Turin to Rome in 1865, the old palaces symbolized only the “nest” of the dynasty but not anymore the whole peninsula. Many rooms of the Royal Palace in Turin were brought back from Neoclassicism to Baroque (destroying some of Pelagio Palagi’s interiors), the Manica Nuova (New Wing) of the same palace was built according to a Late Baroque / Mannerist Revival style by Emilio Stramucci, in 1898–1903. At the same time in the Royal Garden, the northern parterre was redesigned in a French style as in the Baroque period by the garden designer Marcellino Roda. We can conclude: back to Baroque.