Palazzo Scaglia di Verrua

Palazzo Scaglia di Verrua in Turin, Italy is a late sixteenth-century urban palace commissioned within the Savoyard context, begun around 1585 and completed by 1604, built in the Renaissance style. The building preserves its sixteenth-century character rather than being reworked in the later Baroque manner, and it stands among the few Renaissance-era monuments that remain in the city alongside the cathedral.

Construction began in the 1580s under the initiative tied to Abbot Filiberto Scaglia di Verrua, although another contemporary figure, a Savoyard finance minister, is also named in early accounts as a possible instigator. Ownership soon passed to Giacomo Solaro, who carried out enlargements and in 1603 commissioned the painted program on the street front and in the inner court from the Brescian artist Antonio Parentani.

Mid-seventeenth-century works altered the palace under commission of the Scaglia di Verrua family, with substantial interventions carried out between 1650 and 1665. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Verrua family again expanded the property, adding rental houses on what is now Via Garibaldi in 1762 and extending the complex at the corner of Via Stampatori and Via Barbaroux in 1784.

Ownership and use shifted through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The palazzo became a residence for the San Martino della Motta family and later passed to Count Raimondo Balbo Bertone di Sambuy; it was also inhabited at one point by Jeanne Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes. During the nineteenth century the building accommodated diplomatic offices, first for Spain and from 1 November 1861 for the embassy of the Russian Empire. The street block containing the palace suffered heavy damage during the Second World War, yet the palazzo has retained its original Renaissance appearance despite that wartime destruction.