Filippo Juvara is the Bernini of Northern Italy. Not in temperament — Bernini was exuberant, theatrical, competitive; Juvara is more systematic, more learned in the sense of an architectural theorist. But in role: both were court architects of absolute trust to their sovereign, who transformed the capital of their patron into an architectural stage of European standing. Bernini transformed Rome for the papacy. Juvara transformed Turin for the Savoy.
Turin in the eighteenth century is a capital under construction. The Savoy — a peripheral house that became important thanks to its strategic position between France and Italy — wanted a capital that would demonstrate their legitimacy to royal rank (they became Kings of Sicily in 1713, then of Sardinia from 1720). Juvara designed the Basilica of Superga on the hills above Turin (1717–1731), the Stupinigi hunting lodge (1729), the façade and grand staircase of Palazzo Madama, works at the Royal Palace and an entire district for the city's expansion. It is an urban-architectural programme of regal dimensions — literally.
An architect who came from the theatre
Filippo Juvara was born in Messina in 1678, into a family of silversmiths, and was ordained a priest before he turned to architecture. In 1704 he moved to Rome, where he joined the workshop of Carlo Fontana, the most influential architect in the city after Bernini's death. The following year he won first prize in the Concorso Clementino of the Accademia di San Luca. But the training that matters most for understanding Stupinigi lies elsewhere: for several years Juvara worked as a stage designer for the theatre of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, in the Palazzo della Cancelleria. He drew wings, perspectives and illusory spaces that had to change before the audience's eyes. He learned to think of space as a sequence of views, not as a static volume.
In 1714 Victor Amadeus II, newly King of Sicily, met him during his stay on the island and took him to Turin with the title of First Architect to the King. From then on Juvara worked for the Savoy for about twenty years, at an impressive pace: churches, palaces, interiors, urban plans, the Great Gallery and the Chapel of Saint Hubert at the Venaria Reale. In 1735 he was called to Madrid by Philip V of Spain to design the new Royal Palace, but he died the following year, in January 1736, before construction began. The Madrid palace would be built by his pupil Giovanni Battista Sacchetti, in a much reduced version of the original design.
The Saint Andrew's cross plan
The Stupinigi hunting lodge has a plan with no precedent in the history of Italian architecture. The core is an oval hall covered by a dome — the focal point of the building, visible from outside through the dome's profile and the bronze stag on top. From the hall radiate four diagonal wings — the Saint Andrew's cross — each with royal apartments, reception rooms, kitchens. The wings are turned at 45° to the main axis, creating a building that opens toward the four quadrants of the surrounding landscape.
This star shape — unusual for a residence — has a functional reason: hunting. The building stands at the centre of a hunting wood (now largely gone), and the four wings open toward the tree-lined avenues from which the hunters set out. The plan is the map of the hunting routes. Architecture and landscape are designed together.
The landscape around the lodge is organised on the same principle. From the woods run long straight avenues, the hunting routes, which cross at precise points and allow the riders to follow the stag and the court to watch from a distance. The Savoy practised hunting in the French manner, on horseback with packs of hounds, and it was as much a social ritual as a sport: spaces were needed to gather the court before setting out and to celebrate its return. The lodge is therefore not a country house, but the point of arrival and departure of a ritual. Even the approach from Turin is designed: a long straight avenue links the city to the residence, which appears at the end of the perspective like the final scene of a play.
The central hall
The central hall of the lodge is one of the most elegant spaces in Italian Baroque. It is elliptical in plan and double-height, lit by two tiers of windows. The decoration is Rococo, lighter than Roman Baroque: white and gilded stuccoes, mirrors, marbles, and on the vault the <em>Triumph of Diana</em> frescoed by the brothers Giuseppe and Domenico Valeriani. There is nothing heavy or dark here — it is all lightness, colour, movement. We are in the heart of the eighteenth century, and the Baroque has grown lighter.
But let us return to the structure. The hall's vault rests on four great piers, which also carry a balcony suspended halfway up: a structure that reads clearly from inside instead of hiding behind the decoration. Juvara had studied Borromini closely — whose bold geometry he admired — and here uses structural elements Borromini would have approved of: the unconventional form, the light from above, the effect of lightness achieved with heavy materials. Turin Baroque is more intellectual and less theatrical than the Roman kind.
The world of Diana
The entire decoration of the lodge revolves around hunting and its goddess, Diana. Her triumph appears on the vault of the hall; on the four piers, medallions show other images of the goddess. In the apartments the stories continue: in the queen's bedroom the French painter Charles-André van Loo, known as Carle, painted Diana resting after the hunt on the ceiling; in the queen's antechamber the Venetian Giovanni Battista Crosato frescoed the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, in which Diana again intervenes. The choice of painters says a great deal about the Turin court: a Frenchman and a Venetian called to work in the same building, because the Savoy looked at the same time to Paris and to the great tradition of Venetian decorative painting.
The furnishings follow the same taste. Among the furnishings are pieces by Pietro Piffetti, the court cabinetmaker, who made furniture inlaid with precious woods, ivory and mother-of-pearl, and some rooms are lined with Chinese wallpaper, following the fashion for chinoiserie that swept eighteenth-century Europe. The bronze stag crowning the dome is the building's most recognisable sign: the original, made by Francesco Ladatte in 1766, is now kept indoors to protect it from the weather, and a copy stands on the roof. Since 1919 the lodge has housed a museum of furniture and decorative arts, which explains why it is today one of the few places where you can see an eighteenth-century court interior still rich in original furniture, paintings and objects.
The comparison with Versailles
Versailles (1682) and Stupinigi (1729) are two different answers to the same problem: how to build a royal palace that demonstrates absolute power. Versailles uses perfect axial symmetry, the monumentality of scale, the subjection of the landscape to a rigorous geometry. Stupinigi uses lightness, variety of forms, openness toward the landscape instead of control over it. Versailles is a declaration of power. Stupinigi is a gesture of elegance. The Savoy — another eighteenth-century European court — chose elegance over grandiosity. It is not an aesthetic choice: it is a political one. The Europe of 1729 is not that of 1682 — absolute monarchy must justify itself differently.
The hunting star in Europe
The idea of organising a wood around a centre from which straight avenues radiate was not born in Turin. In the royal forests of France, at Compiègne and Fontainebleau, hunting routes were already being laid out in the 17th century, converging on circular clearings, the rond-points, from which one could see in several directions. It is a rational way of making legible a territory that is confused by nature: the forest. Juvara's originality lies in bringing that geometry inside the building. It is not only the park that is star-shaped; the plan of the residence itself extends the avenues, so that someone standing in the hall is at the exact point where they cross.
A few years later, in Germany, the same idea took an even more radical form. At Clemenswerth, in Lower Saxony, the architect Johann Conrad Schlaun built between 1737 and 1747 a hunting lodge for the Prince-Elector of Cologne: a central building surrounded by eight smaller pavilions arranged in a circle, with the forest avenues radiating out in the gaps between them. There the residence breaks up into small separate buildings; at Stupinigi, by contrast, it remains a single body that stretches out towards the landscape. Comparing the two solutions helps to show what sets Juvara apart: not the geometry itself, which circulated throughout Europe, but his ability to turn it into a continuous habitable space, in which you move from the hall to the private rooms without ever losing your bearings with respect to the forest.
After Juvara: Alfieri and the crown of delights
The lodge we see today is not Juvara's alone. After his departure, work continued for decades under Benedetto Alfieri, his successor as court architect. Alfieri added wings, stables and service buildings arranged around large courtyards open towards Turin, turning the star-shaped core into a much larger complex. The result remains consistent with the original idea: from the city you approach through a sequence of ever narrower spaces, up to the central hall, and from there the view opens out again onto the woods. It is a theatrical scheme, built with buildings instead of stage flats.
Stupinigi is part of a wider system that contemporaries called the crown of delights: a ring of royal residences around Turin, including the Venaria Reale, the castles of Rivoli and Moncalieri, the Valentino and Racconigi. Each had a precise role in the life of the court, from hunting to summer retreat, and together they drew the dynasty's presence across the territory. In 1997 UNESCO inscribed the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy on the World Heritage List precisely as a system, not as individual buildings. Later history confirms Stupinigi's prestige: in May 1805 Napoleon stayed there on his way to Milan for his coronation as King of Italy.
What to look at when you visit
The lodge lies about ten kilometres from the centre of Turin, in the municipality of Nichelino, in the middle of a nature park of more than one thousand seven hundred hectares. The best way to understand it is to arrive along the avenue from Turin and watch how the building widens as you approach: first you see the stag, then the dome, then the wings opening like arms. Once inside, it is worth stopping at the centre of the hall and looking towards the four wings: from that point you understand that the Saint Andrew's cross plan is not an eccentricity, but a way of having four perspectives on the landscape from a single position. Finally, it is worth comparing the lightness of the apartments with the severity of the Basilica of Superga, designed by the same architect in the same years: two very different buildings that show how well Juvara could adapt his language to the function.