Savoy Castle

Queen Margherita of Savoy began holidaying at Gressoney-Saint-Jean in 1889, when she and her husband Umberto I stayed at the residence of Baron Beck Peccoz, a house later renamed Villa Margherita in her honour. Taken with the Lys Valley, she resolved to build one of her own on the flank of the valley below the Colle Ranzola, at 1,440 metres, looking out to the peaks of Monte Rosa. Umberto I resisted the idea; he preferred the Castello di Sarre and its long days of hunting. Margherita obtained the permission all the same, and gave the commission to Emilio Stramucci, an architect already employed on the remodelling of the Palazzo Reale and other Savoy residences. The first stone was laid on 24 August 1899.

The king was assassinated at Monza in 1900 by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, and so never stayed in the house, which was not finished until 1904. Margherita followed the building closely, attending its progress with particular assiduity; the mixture of styles was her own explicit demand. Stramucci gave her a three-storey villa on a rectangular plan, built with heavy use of local rock and flanked by five neo-Gothic towers of differing heights, one of them octagonal, each under a spire unlike the others. The tallest carried a covered terrace whose dormer windows let the Royal Carabinieri keep the whole property in view.

The interiors were the work of suppliers to the royal house. Michele Dellera, a Turin carver, made the double semicircular oak staircase of the hall of honour, the wall panelling and the coffered ceilings, worked densely with Savoy emblems and floral motifs that explicitly recalled the sovereign's own name. Carlo Cussetti painted the murals and designed the linen and silk hangings.

The house was built without kitchens. Margherita wanted them outside the building altogether, some thirty metres off, and meals reached the table through an underground gallery laid with a double Decauville track: hermetically sealed electric trolleys ran the courses along it to an internal lift that carried them straight up into the dining room. The noble floor held the private apartments of the queen, her son Vittorio Emanuele III, her daughter-in-law Queen Elena and her grandson Umberto II, with a smaller room kept for the Marchesa Paola Pes di Villamarina. Along the drive stood the Villa Belvedere, which served as guest house and as quarters for the caretakers, the servants and the escort of Royal Carabinieri.

Widowed and by then confined to the role of queen mother, Margherita spent long holiday seasons at Gressoney until 1925, surrounding herself with the men of letters whose company she liked, among them the poet Giosuè Carducci and her devoted grandson, the young Prince of Piedmont Umberto II. The Romitaggio Carducci, one of the other buildings on the estate, is dedicated to the memory of the poet who stayed there. She died at Bordighera in 1926, during her winter stay there.

The castle stood shut for some years after her death. In 1936 it was sold to the Milanese industrialist Ettore Moretti, who kept it very nearly intact, and his heirs sold it on to the autonomous region of the Aosta Valley in 1981. The region owns it still, protected as Italian national heritage and run as a museum; the outbuilding that once held the queen's kitchens has served since 1981 as the ticket office and visitor facilities. The grounds hold the Savoy Castle Alpine Botanical Garden.