A return to its former glory, hidden by layers of white paint for centuries.
The Fai, the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano, today inaugurated the Salone dei Savoia at the Castle of Masino, after three years of restorations that have brought to light a surprising cycle of frescoes from the end of the seventeenth century, perfectly preserved and hitherto hidden from coats of paint of a subsequent installation.
Until 2019 the Salone dei Savoia had been used as a nineteenth-century picture gallery, with walls painted in simple white.
From some glimpses of the underlying decoration, the presence of earlier frescoes was hypothesized, but such a discovery was unimaginable: the painting on the 480 square meters of the hall has been removed, today this treasure turns out to be completely different and has returned to the appearance it had in the end of the seventeenth century.
A sumptuously frescoed reception room with trompe l'oeil painted architecture framing landscape views of 22 cities in Piedmont and Savoy, with a frieze of 147 noble coats of arms and a three-meter-high family tree on the fireplace.
It is an iconographic program without comparisons that, through heraldry, celebrates the Savoy dynasty, to which the Valperga family,
owner of the Castle of Masino for centuries, she was closely linked and loyal.
The Hall, which is also the largest in the complex, has not only been restored but has been refurbished as it was, with armchairs on the walls and large golden lanterns in the center, and is today the fulcrum of the tour.
"More than in the artistic quality, the value of these unpublished and unexpected frescoes is in the small and large stories they tell and which are still to be discovered, which enrich the heritage of knowledge of the castle on characters, historical events, functions and decorations of the rooms, but above all they open the way to further, inexhaustible and promising research ", make it known from the FAI.
Since 1988, when it purchased the property still inhabited by the last descendant, Luigi Valperga, the Foundation has never stopped dedicating itself to the care of this heritage, investing a total of almost 16 million euros in maintenance, conservation and new restoration sites.
The inauguration was attended, among others, by Marco Magnifico, Chairman of Fai, Bruna Flecchia, Deputy Mayor of Caravino, and Alberto Cirio, President of the Piedmont Region.
After the ceremony, a short round table discussion with four ambassadors followed.
The Fai thus wanted to recall the function of maximum representation that the Salone dei Savoia and the three adjacent rooms had, at the end of the seventeenth century, conceived precisely to welcome the foreign diplomats of the epic.
A reflection, today more relevant than ever, on the meaning and value of European unity and the common identity on which it is historically based.