The puppet show or marionette theatres of Turin have ever been famous, indeed the fantoccini theatre had its origin in Piedmont. The buffon Gianduja was of Piedmontese birth, as was Arlequino of Bergamo.
Around Turin are various suburban neighbourhoods with historic memories and some palace and villa remains which might well be noted.
The Vigna della Regina, or the Queen’s Vineyard, is the name given to a once royal residence, now a girls’ school. The house was built in 1650 by Cardinal Maurice of Savoy. Another one of the nearby sights, not usually “taken in,” is the natural garden (an undefiled landscape garden) arranged in the sixteenth century by the Duke of Savoy, Emanuele Filiberto.
King Carlo Felice had a country house called the Castello d’Aglie to the north of the city. It is remarkable for nothing but the pure air of the neighbourhood, and that abounds everywhere in these parts.
At Rivoli, a few kilometres out on the Mont Cenis road, is a clumsily built, half finished mass of buildings, planned by Vittorio Amedeo II. in the eighteenth century as a royal residence to which he some day might return if he ever got tired of playing abdicator. He occupied it surely enough, in due course, but as a prisoner, not as a ruler. He was a well-meaning monarch, and through him the house of Savoy obtained Sardinia, but he made awful blunders at times, or at least one, for ultimately he landed in prison where he died in 1732.
Six leagues from Turin is the little garrison town of Pinerolo. A heap of stones on the mountain marks the site of a chateau where were once imprisoned the man of the Iron Mask, Lauzun, the political prisoner of history, and Fouquet, the money-grabbing minister of Louis XIV.