The Galleria Sabauda inside the Musei Reali complex in Turin is well worth a visit. Since December of 2014, it has been located in the new wing of the Palazzo reale, which was built between the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the court architect Emilio Stramucci.
Established in 1832 by Carlo Alberto under the name of Reale Galleria, the collections from Palazzo Reale and Palazzo Carignano in Turin and Palazzo Durazzo in Genoa were brought together as one, and the Casa Savoia collection, then famous throughout Europe, was opened to the public. In 1860, Vittorio Emanuele II handed the picture gallery over to the State. With the wealth of purchases and donations accumulated over the 19th and 20th centuries, it became one of the most important art collections in Italy, from 1933 named the Galleria Sabauda.
On the four floors of exhibition space, the visitor can admire works from the 14th to the 20th centuries by Piedmontese, Italian and European artists, and Dutch and Flemish artists in particular. Exhibited on the first floor in the neo-baroque Sala degli Stucchi is The ballad of forgotten places by Botto&Bruno. The work, the result of the project sponsored by the Merz Foundation and winner of the third edition of the Italian Council competition (2018), became part of the Musei Reali collections in February of 2020, after being exhibited in Athens (National Museum of Contemporary Art EMST), Lisbon (Carpintarias de São Lázaro) and Nice (Le109: Pôle De Cultures Contemporaines).
The Sala degli Stucchi, one of the exhibition rooms along the itinerary, is richly decorated and overlooks a part of the city where the stratifications from the Roman era to the 1970s are clearly visible. The room surrounds the installation which looks like a contemporary “ruin”. The outer walls are the remains of a modernist architecture inside of which the interior walls and floor are completely covered with the image of a peripheral landscape where nature has swallowed up remains of buildings and past life.
At the center of the space is a three hundred-page book containing photographs of places that have disappeared or whose identities have been altered, shot over twenty years of work, pictorially modified like the images on the wall. “For the viewer, the book becomes like a sort of trip”, specify Botto&Bruno. “The initial images are still sharp and recognizable but, as you leaf through the pages, you realize that the blotches change color and become darker, making the landscape disappear almost completely. The idea was to create a ruin that, almost like a sort of embrace, protected the memory of the places preserved in the book”.
