#noveparole. 3 - Vision

This is the reception hall, the heart of the architectural plan of the Venaria. If you look up to the vault and turn around, you will see the three lines of images, pictures and frescoes, as if they were on stage, rather like a theatre of the world.

To call this architecture is somewhat reductive. Instead, it is a vision that you will understand precisely from being in this room, at this viewpoint. 

This is the beating heart of the vision but also its threshold, marking the transition between eras, rooms both public and private, and even between the cardinal points. 

It is known as the Hall of Diana, dedicated to Diana the huntress. After all, the Reggia started life as a place for hunting and leisure pursuits.

Like all the rooms it has walls and windows. But this hall, thanks to its perspectives, starts far beyond the walls and windows. It starts far off to the east, at the top of the Superga hill with its imposing Basilica built for Victor Amadeus II and designed by the abbot Filippo Juvarra. It ends, like all visions, with a certain sense of yearning, far to the west, where the sun sets behind the mountains.

This hall is the pivotal point on a long itinerary, not just the one around the Reggia, although it is also that. This hall speaks of the kilometres of distance stretching from east to west, from Superga as far as the mountains towards France.

From this point, with your feet firmly on the ground as you walk and head held high to allow the eye and the mind to roam free, you might realise a poetic, rather visionary truth. To paraphrase three dazzling verses by the imaginative Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, a globetrotter who lived in the early 20th century, here you discover that: “The four cardinal points / are three / East and West.”