Palazzo Madama di Torino

Palazzo Madama e Casaforte degli Acaja is a palace in Turin, northern Italy. It was the first Senate of the Italian Kingdom, and takes its traditional name from the embellishments it received under two queens (madama) of the House of Savoy. At the beginning of the first century BC, the site of the palace was occupied by a gate in the Roman walls from which the decumanusmaximus of Augusta Taurinorum (the ancient name of Turin) departed. Two of the towers, although restored, still testify to this original nucleus. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the gate was used as a fortified stronghold in the defences of the city. The Palazzo Madama houses Turin’s Museo Civico d’Arte Antica. It is not Turin’s museum of ancient art–that is a mistranslation–but rather a large collection of paintings, statues, church ornaments, porcelain, and decorative art, mostly from the late Middle Ages to the 18th Century. Turin’s museum of ancient art is called the Museo dell’Antichita and is located in another place. Palazzo Madama houses paintings, sculptures, majolicas and porcelains, gold and silver items, furnishings and textiles from the Middle Ages to the start of the nineteenth century. More than 3000 works document the richness and complexity of ten centuries of Italian and European artistic production. Until July 4, the Madama Palace in Turin is hosting the exhibition “From Poussin to the Impressionists. Three centuries of French painting.” On display are more than 70 works by fifty artists.