Castle of Moncalieri

The first building on the hill was defensive, chosen for a position that commanded the main southern approach to Turin: Thomas I of Savoy built a fortress there about 1100, and a stronghold stood on the hill down to the thirteenth century. In 1277 Thomas of Savoy, known as Tommasino, ordered the building of a tower and a crenellated gate.

The building standing today dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, when Moncalieri was chosen as the residence of Duchess Yolande of Valois, wife of Duke Amadeus IX, who turned the fortress into a house of pleasure. There she signed the Treaty of Moncalieri with Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, recovering the Duchy of Savoy by it.

With the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559, which ended the wars in Italy between France and the Habsburgs, the old castle was converted into a royal dwelling and two hundred trees were added to the park. The furnished interiors became the setting for continuous grand entertainments; embellishment went on without pause thereafter, and it came to be called the luogo di delizie.

The seventeenth-century enlargement gave the castle its present plan, a horseshoe facing south with four massive square towers at its angles. Duke Charles Emmanuel I began the works in 1610; Victor Amadeus I carried them on, and above all Madama Reale, Christine of France, under whom they ran without pause for some sixty years, directed by Amedeo di Castellamonte, Andrea Costaguta and Carlo Morello. In the first half of the eighteenth century King Charles Emmanuel III commissioned further embellishment, continued by his son Victor Amadeus III, with Benedetto Alfieri and, in 1775, Francesco Martinez among the architects at work.

Maria Vittoria Francesca of Savoy was married there to the Prince of Carignano, and in 1781 Maria Carolina of Savoy was married there by proxy to Anthony of Saxony. Maria Antonietta of Spain, wife of Victor Amadeus III, died at Moncalieri in 1785; the king himself died there in 1796.

In 1798 it was the first castle occupied by the French army, which held it until 1814, using it first as a prison and then as a hospital; part of the eighteenth-century work was destroyed in the process. With the Restoration the castle passed back to the house of Savoy, and in 1817 Victor Emmanuel I ordered both repairs and new building, among them the three-flight staircase in Carrara marble leading up to the Queen's Hall and the Cavallerizza at the end of the Piazza d'Armi.

Under Charles Albert of Sardinia, Prince of Carignano, the castle became the residence where the young princes of the family studied. Victor Emmanuel II preferred it to the Royal Palace of Turin and had numerous apartments furnished to his own taste; it was from Moncalieri, in 1849, that the Proclamation of Moncalieri was issued, written by Massimo d'Azeglio and signed by the king. He and Queen Maria Adelaide had their apartments entirely reworked in the fashion of the day, which stripped those rooms of the traces of earlier centuries; the queen's blue drawing room was fitted out in 1852.

The last of the house of Savoy to live at Moncalieri were Princess Maria Clotilde, known as the Saint of Moncalieri, wife of Prince Napoleon Jerome Bonaparte, and her daughter Princess Maria Letizia Bonaparte, Duchess of Aosta, who lived there until her death on 25 October 1926. Under Fascism the castle became the seat of party officials and then of the Nazis; it served again as a hospital during the Second World War, and finally as a shelter for people left without homes.

Since 1921 the castle has quartered the 1st Battalion of the Carabinieri, and since 1948 it has been the seat of the 1st "Piemonte" Regiment, in the barracks named for Major Alfredo Serranti. The castle was listed by UNESCO in 1997 among the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy and carries Italian national heritage designation. The royal apartments were restored and opened to the public in 1991.

On 5 April 2008 fire damaged the south-east tower and the hall in which the Proclamation of Moncalieri had been signed, closing the visitor route and forcing a fresh cycle of restoration. The castle has been open to visitors again since 11 November 2017. The complex belongs to several public bodies: the royal apartments to the culture ministry, and the Rose Garden inside the perimeter wall to the ministry but entrusted to the comune of Moncalieri, which also holds the large park behind.