Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi

The Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi is one of the most unusual royal buildings in Europe — a hunting lodge on the scale of a palace, with a floor plan unlike any other royal residence. Filippo Juvarra, the most gifted architect working in early 18th-century Europe, designed it for Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in 1729 with a single decisive idea: a cross-shaped building where the arms meet at 45-degree angles rather than 90, creating a star when seen from above, with four wings of apartments radiating from a central oval hall.

The logic was practical as well as spectacular. Each wing pointed toward a different section of the Stupinigi hunting forest, allowing courtiers to be assigned quarters oriented toward the area they would use during the hunt. The central hall was the assembly point before and after — a grand space where the entire court gathered, with a painted vault depicting the Triumph of Diana (goddess of the hunt) and a bronze stag weather vane on the dome above. The building stood at the edge of the forest with an unobstructed view down the straight approach avenue, designed to be seen from Turin on clear days.

Juvarra's genius was the fusion of practical function with theatrical effect. A hunting lodge needs efficiency — easy movement between apartments, quick access to stables and kennels, clear lines of sight to the hunting grounds. Stupinigi achieves all of this while simultaneously producing a building that looks, from any distance, like a royal declaration of intent. The warm brick exterior, the curvature of the central hall, the bronze stag catching the light at the dome's peak — the building announces itself without ostentation.

Napoleon stayed at Stupinigi in June 1800 following his victory at the Battle of Marengo, using the palace as his Turin base before reorganising northern Italy under French authority. Queen Margherita, born here in 1851, grew up to become the first Queen of unified Italy — wife of Umberto I and the person for whom the Margherita pizza is named (a Neapolitan pizzaiolo created it in her honour during a royal visit in 1889). The palace passed to the Italian state after the Second World War and has housed the Museo Nazionale dell'Arredamento (National Museum of Furniture and Decorative Arts) since 1946 — some 40,000 objects in the royal apartments.

The GYG entry ticket (t447755, €14) includes an audioguide app that covers the main rooms. Stupinigi is the most affordable of the major Savoy residences to visit independently — the architecture alone justifies the trip.