In 1563, with the transfer of the duchy’s capital from Chambéry to Turin, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy established his residence in the bishop’s palace, near the Cathedral.
Already in 1584, however, Charles Emmanuel I entrusted architect Ascanio Vittozzi with the construction of a new building. After 1643, during the regency of Maria Cristina of France, the direction of the works passed to Carlo di Castellamonte and then to Carlo Morello.
At the same time, the furnishing of the state rooms on the first floor proceeded, characterized by richly carved and gilded wooden ceilings with large allegorical canvases by Jan Miel and Charles Dauphin, whose subjects exalt the virtues of the sovereign according to an iconographic program dictated by the court rhetorician Emanuele Tesauro.
In 1688, the painter Daniel Seiter was called from Rome to fresco the gallery since then called “of Daniel.” Seiter, assisted by the Genoese painter Bartolomeo Guidobono, also worked on the ground floor apartment, later called Madama Felicita’s. At the end of the seventeenth century, the garden layout was revised and expanded by the famous French architect André Le Notre.
When Vittorio Amedeo II obtained the royal title in 1713, the so-called “command zone” was created, annexed to the palace and consisting of the Secretariats, the Offices, the Royal Theater, and the State Archives.
The mastermind behind these interventions was the Sicilian architect Filippo Juvarra, who inside the palace built the daring Scissors Staircase and the Chinese Cabinet. Several rooms are adorned with paintings by Claudio Francesco Beaumont, official painter of Charles Emmanuel III, who ascended the throne in 1730.
After Juvarra left for Madrid, the position of chief royal architect passed to Benedetto Alfieri, who defined the decorative apparatus of the apartments on the second floor, renewed the Daniel Gallery, and set up the new Archive rooms, frescoed by Francesco De Mura and Gregorio Guglielmi.
In the time of Charles Albert (1831-1849), some rooms on the main floor were renewed under the direction of the Bolognese Pelagio Palagi, such as the Swiss Hall and the Council Room, as well as part of the apartments on the second floor.
Close to the Unification of Italy, in 1862, the new grand staircase was built. With the transfer of the capital from Turin to Florence and then to Rome, the palace gradually lost its residential functions; since 1955 it has been entrusted to the Superintendent for Architectural and Landscape Heritage.
