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Galleria San Federico belongs to the Via Roma Nuova programme, the demolition-and-rebuild operation that replaced an entire stratum of medieval and nineteenth-century Turin with a continuous rationalist street wall between Piazza Castello and Porta Nuova. The block bounded by Via Roma, Via Santa Teresa and Via Bertola was assigned to the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà, a Trieste-based insurance company that wanted a mixed-use complex anchored by a covered shopping passage. The brief asked for shops at ground level, offices above, an underground car park and a large cinema. Vittorio Bonadè Bottino, then a senior in-house designer for Fiat with a parallel architectural practice, delivered the masterplan with engineer Giovanni Canova. Construction ran on a compressed schedule between 1932 and 1933, in step with the wider Via Roma deadline of late 1933 for the first lot. The result is a T-shaped gallery with three street entrances, calibrated so that pedestrians can cross the block in any direction without leaving the cover of the vault.

The architectural language of the passage sits at the seam between two impulses. The street facades on Via Roma follow the rigid travertine grid imposed by the city for the Via Roma Nuova lots: full-height piers, regular bays, no projecting cornices, the disciplined Mediterranean classicism that Marcello Piacentini and his Turin counterparts theorised as a national rationalism.

Inside, the language relaxes. The elliptical barrel vault, built in glass panes set into a reinforced-concrete grid, is detailed as a single uninterrupted surface rather than as a sequence of decorated bays; the floor patterns and the metal shopfronts use the geometric vocabulary of the early 1930s; the Cinema Lux foyer, designed by Eugenio Corte, deploys curved walls and indirect lighting that prefigure the cinema interiors of the late thirties. Razionalismo is here a programme more than a stylistic dogma: the structure is exposed where it serves, ornamented where it serves, and the diagram of the passage takes priority over symmetry.

The gallery was inaugurated in 1933 and quickly became one of the busier interior streets in the city, helped by the Cinema Lux and by the proximity of the new Piazza C.L.N. and Via Roma shopfronts. It survived the Second World War with limited damage and stayed in continuous commercial use through the post-war decades. A full restoration campaign in the 2000s recovered the original floor and vault surfaces, modernised the technical services and reorganised the Cinema Lux as a multiplex with an attached restaurant. The passage is now a privately managed but publicly accessible pedestrian shortcut, open during business hours, and is routinely cited in Turin guides as the most coherent surviving fragment of the Via Roma rationalist operation together with Piazza C.L.N. and the Galleria Subalpina nearby.