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The hotel was commissioned by SAGAT, the Turin hospitality consortium, to give the city a flagship address along the new Via Roma. Work began under Vittorio Bonadè Bottino, the FIAT staff architect already at work on the corporation’s monumental residential and resort buildings, with Giovanni Chevalley contributing his long experience of Turin’s urban fabric. Drawings were finalised in 1934; the structure was raised between 1934 and 1935 and the hotel opened its doors in 1936.

The project belonged to the second phase of the Via Roma redevelopment, the stretch coordinated by Marcello Piacentini between 1937 and 1938, where the eclectic baroque language of the first section gave way to the austere rationalist vocabulary that Turin would carry into the late 1930s.

The building reads as a single tall block, anchored to a travertine base and clad above in pale ceramic tile that holds the light cleanly across the long elevation. Windows are aligned in steady vertical bands; cornices are reduced to thin shadow lines; corners are sharp rather than turned. Inside, the reinforced-concrete frame allowed Bonadè Bottino and Chevalley to organise public rooms, dining halls, and a roof terrace without the heavy load-bearing walls that older Turin hotels still relied on. The result is recognisably rationalist in its discipline, yet the materials and the proportioning keep it within the restrained, almost classical register that distinguished the Turin school from the more polemical Milanese and Como circles of the same decade. Travertine, ceramic, and the regular grid of openings carry the weight of representation that ornament would have carried a generation earlier.

The Principi di Piemonte operated through the war years and the post-war reconstruction, becoming a fixed point of civic and business hospitality alongside the nearby Torre Littoria. The hotel closed for an extended restoration ahead of the 2006 Winter Olympics and reopened to the public on 17 October 2019, after a roughly six-million-euro programme that reorganised the interiors while preserving the original facade composition. It now operates as a five-star property and remains part of the protected Via Roma ensemble, read together with the surrounding Piacentini-era blocks as one of the most coherent rationalist urban set-pieces in northern Italy.