The Palazzo Madama

On 19 December 2025, the exhibition “Il castello ritrovato. Palazzo Madama dall’età romana al medioevo” opened in Turin at the Museo di Palazzo Madama. The exhibition, which runs until March 26, 2026, explores the medieval past of a castle that played a significant role in Italian history from the early modern period onward, eventually becoming the seat of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy. But the castle also has a medieval past that remained relatively unknown and only marginally represented in the museum’s permanent display until the opening of this show.

The current exhibition displays medieval objects drawn from the museum’s extensive collections, which are among the most important in Italy. It also features several 3D video reconstructions from which the still images featured above have been taken. The videos offer visitors a chance to appreciate the artifacts in the spaces where they once were housed. The research process needed to reconstruct the castle's medieval spaces, undertaken by a team of historians and architectural historians, involved both material remains and documentary evidence. The research itself led to two major findings. First, new light was shed upon the original architectural layout, meaning that the research team could formulate plausible configurations of the castle's rooms and base their 3D reconstructions upon these floor plans. Second, the records of the objects located in each individual room allowed the team to identify the functions of those spaces.

Some of the most important discoveries emerged from a close study of records preserved in the State Archives of Turin. In addition to extensive accounting documents, at least four inventories of the castle of Turin’s holdings are extant, of which one has been published on DALME with the remainder to appear soon. All four of the inventories known to us today were compiled in the first half of the fourteenth century, in the years 1416, 1419, 1431, and 1433. The first two, written in Latin, provide a snapshot of the castle’s holdings during the period in which it was controlled by the Princes of Savoy-Achaia up to the death of Louis, the last of his line, in 1419. The third inventory, written in French and dating to 1431, records what was kept at the castle after it had passed into the hands of the main branch of the family, the House of Savoy, following Louis’s death. The last inventory, from 1433, was again written Latin, and provides a concise reckoning of the castle’s furnishings. By comparing these inventories with those from other Piedmontese castles belonging to the Savoy-Achaia and Savoy dynasties at roughly the same time, scholars are able to see how the castle was transformed after 1419 from an urban fortress, with functions that were primarily military in nature, into a prestigious family residence. The objects listed in the inventories, notably the large quantity of luxury goods listed in the 1431 and 1433 records, are crucial for understanding this change,.

The 3D video reconstructions feature the kitchen, the chamber of the Prince of Piedmont, and the courtyard, which provided access to the great hall, the sala magna bassa. The inventories used for these reconstructions are those from 1419 and 1433, the only two that record the distribution of objects room by room. To judge by the 1419 inventory, the kitchen was well equipped with cookware and a larderium, a downstairs room that probably served as a pantry. The courtyard and the sala magna bassa — today the Sala Acaia, which is where the current exhibition is installed — appear in both the 1419 and 1433 inventories, which describe them as multifunctional spaces in which display items, used for ceremonial and public functions, alternated with furniture and other kinds of objects that were being stored somewhat haphazardly. For example, in 1419, there were not only tables and chairs in the sala magna bassa but also a bombard (a type of cannon); in 1433, in addition to the tables, there was still a bombard along with several carts grouped next to one another, a broken ladder, and some chests.

The prince’s chamber, by contrast, appears only in the 1431 inventory. This document records furnishings of incomparable luxury, as evidenced by the materials used, which include silver, gold, and precious textiles. The contrast with the sparsely furnished rooms inhabited by the Savoy-Achaia before 1419 is especially stark. Among the items listed in 1431 are a small library consisting of some ten manuscripts, a gilded silver astrolabe, silk brocades and velvets, gilded and enameled silver clasps bearing images of Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Catherine, a gold medallion with an image of Veronica on one side and an Agnus Dei on the other, a casket worked by a Parisian goldsmith, several sets of chess pieces (including one in ivory with figurative pieces) and a map depicting the cities and rivers of Italy (“ung mapamond contenans les cités et rivères d’Ytalie”). Although it is not possible to know to which map this phrase refers, it may have been similar to this military map in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.