THE GRAND GALLERY

By the end of the 15th century, a building beside the Roman walls already served as a covered walkway between the Bishop's Palace, subsequently demolished during the construction of the Royal Palace, and the castle of the Acaja (the original name of Palazzo Madama). At the beginning of the 17th century, Duke Charles Emmanuel I transformed this passage into the Gallery, namely a library and museum to house his collections in 22 cabinets labelled with a list of their contents: ancient bronzes, technical and scientific instruments, naturalistic curiosities, thousands of books. Sculptures, inscriptions, mosaics and other antiquities were partly stacked between the library's cabinets on the first floor, and partly set in the walls of the ground-floor arcades.

The Gallery caught fire in 1621 and was judged unsafe a few years . Some of its items, including the 26 volumes of the Pirro Ligorio codex now held in the State Archives, were moved to other places. In 1659, another fire greatly damaged the building, so much so that years went by before several marbles, such as the grave marker of Lossia Quinta, were recovered from the rubble. The Gallery was rebuilt and refashioned more than once between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On 23 June 1800, a few days after the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon issued a decree designed to secure the total disarmament of the State of Savoy and the demolition of its fortifications, coupled with the reshaping of its towns. The Citadels of Turin and Alessandria alone were spared. The demolition operations began with the outer works and filling of the moats prior to removal of the bastions and covered passages. On 22 March 1801, the demolition commission decided that the Gallery, too, must be removed. The building was emptied in great haste while scholars and lovers of the arts recorded as much as they could. The marbles, acquired by Francesco Parodi Scarpellino”, were eventually recovered in part and transferred to the Museum. But there was not enough time to extract all the items from the walls and an uncertain number of inscriptions and reliefs disappeared within the rubble of the Gallery.

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