Venaria Reale project

21/04/2016 16:26:48
  • News & Events
IN

This Palace - “Reggia” in Italian - has a tormented and complex history: from the splendours of the Seventeenth Century to the culmination of its top times in the eighteenth century and again from the slow inexorable decline of the nineteenth century, when the palace - following the will of King Vittorio Emanuele II - was transformed into military barracks, to the complete ruin of the twentieth century.

The restorations therefore had to take into consideration the constructive features and the extension of the building, considered as "unfinished" and where over nearly 200 years the most famous royal architects worked and the extremely serious consequences of the abandonment: in 1950 the Palace appeared in fact as fully abandoned and in ruins.

The appearance was depressing: collapsed floors, walls linked by some beam that had survived fires and vandalism, non-existing windows and doors, the rich decorations totally decayed, unusable rooms due to the rubble and guano of bats. Since after the war, the National Board of Cultural Heritage sought to remedy the deterioration with static-type and early intervention works, aimed interventions and never organic ones that, although never coming to a conclusion because of the chronic lack of funds, however, spared the building from its total collapse.

The complexity of the required interventions and the extraordinary dimensions of the Venaria Reale made it essential to have an equally extraordinary budgetary allocation to assist and support a targeted and punctual project, with indications of precise use destinations aimed at enhancing its potential: the "The Venaria Reale Project" was thus conceived, which is up to the present the most important European project for the restoration and enhancement of a building having cultural value and its territory.


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