Villa della Regina

Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy began building the villa in 1615, modelling it on the hillside villas he had admired in Rome, and later queens of the Savoy dynasty — the source of its name — expanded it over the following century with frescoed interiors and an ambitious terraced garden that climbs the slope behind the house in geometric steps, fed by fountains powered by an ingenious hydraulic system built into the hillside itself.

The villa's fortunes turned sharply in the 20th century: German troops occupied it during the Second World War, and it was later pressed into use as housing for workers, a use never intended for a Baroque royal residence and one that took a heavy toll on its interiors. By the late 20th century it had fallen into serious disrepair, and it took an extensive restoration beginning in the 1990s to bring the rooms, garden and vineyard back to something close to their original state, finally reopening to visitors in 2006.

The hillside behind the villa holds a genuine working vineyard, and it's not merely decorative: grapes grown here go into a Freisa di Chieri DOC Superiore, a real, bottled, appellation-controlled wine — making Villa della Regina's vigna one of the only urban vineyards in Italy, and in Europe, to produce a wine with official denomination status, alongside a small handful of comparable plots in cities like Paris and Vienna.

Production is tiny by any commercial standard — a typical harvest yields only a few thousand bottles — but that scarcity is part of the point: it's a living link to a time when aristocratic villas on Turin's hills were still working agricultural estates, not just ornamental retreats.

The villa is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, open Wednesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, and tickets are inexpensive by the standards of Turin's grander Savoy residences — a good option if you want a genuine royal interior and garden without the crowds that gather at the Palazzo Reale or Palazzina di Stupinigi.

Because it draws fewer visitors than Turin's headline Savoy sites, Villa della Regina rewards an unhurried visit — allow time to walk the full terraced garden up the hillside, not just the ground-floor rooms, since the layered views back over the Po and the city are as much the point as the frescoes indoors.