Palazzo Madama stacks two thousand years of Turin into one building: a Roman city gate anchors the base, a medieval Acaja castle rises from it, and Filippo Juvarra wrapped the whole thing in a Baroque facade and a grand staircase in 1721, commissioned by Marie Jeanne Baptiste of Savoy-Nemours, one of the 'Madamas Reali' who gave the palace its name.
Inside, the Museo Civico d'Arte Antica runs from Gothic ivories and Books of Hours to Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Man, a small oil panel whose sitter's half-smile has unsettled viewers since the 1470s. The medieval towers still stand behind Juvarra's front, so a single walk around the building crosses Roman, medieval and eighteenth-century Turin in a few hundred meters.
