A hotel on the Vanchiglia side of Corso Regina Margherita, in the quarter planned by Turin’s enlargement scheme of 1851–1852. The hotel calls its home a Liberty villa of 1897. We could not confirm the date, the style or the architect, but the city’s own town plan does single out the main building on the lot as one of particular historic interest. This page sets out that record, the history of the quarter, and what remains open.
At a glance
Number 57 stands on the south side of Corso Regina Margherita, the long east–west avenue that separates the northern districts from the centre of Turin, in the stretch that runs through Borgo Vanchiglia towards the Po. In the city’s general town plan (Piano Regolatore Generale), the building set back from the corso on this lot is marked as an edificio di particolare interesse storico, in the group of “buildings of considerable historic value”, a group the plan defines as including houses, palazzine, villas and small villas with gardens. The hotel states that the house is a Liberty villa built in 1897 and that each of its twelve rooms is dedicated to an Italian painter of the Liberty period. We have found no independent source for the date, the style or the name of the designer, and no free photograph of the building.
Key facts
- Where: Corso Regina Margherita 57, 10124 Turin, Borgo Vanchiglia (Circoscrizione 7)
- Town plan: the main building on the lot is an “edificio di particolare interesse storico”, group 2, “edifici di rilevante valore storico” (PRG, Norme urbanistico edilizie di attuazione, art. 26); a smaller building on the corso frontage, also used by the hotel according to OpenStreetMap, is not included. The lot lies in the plan’s “Zona Urbana Storico Ambientale”
- National catalogue: a search of the Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali for the address returns no architectural record
- Date and style: 1897, Liberty, according to the hotel; not confirmed independently
- Architect: unknown to us
- Current use: Hotel dei Pittori, twelve rooms each dedicated to an Italian painter of the Liberty period, according to the hotel
- Coordinates: 45.071801, 7.697665 · open in Google Maps
History
The enlargement plan for the capital drawn up by the architect Carlo Promis in 1851–1852 set out to drain and build over the triangle between the river and the present Corso Regina Margherita and Corso San Maurizio, which the old Jewish cemetery and an open sewer known as the canale dei canonici had made notoriously unhealthy. The ground left uneven by the dismantled fortifications near the Giardini Reali was levelled, and the first plots were taken mostly by commercial buildings. Houses and blocks of flats followed only after the capital moved to Florence in 1865, many of them put up by the building company of the engineer Alessandro Antonelli, the designer of the Mole. At the eastern end of the corso a bridge over the Po, begun in 1877 and finished in 1882, was built on the line of the city’s customs wall to serve the new quarter.
For number 57 itself our evidence is thin. The hotel dates the house to 1897 and describes it as a Liberty villa. The two claims sit awkwardly together: MuseoTorino, the city’s online museum, notes that the start of the Liberty season in Turin is conventionally dated to the international exhibition of modern decorative art of 1902, so a Liberty house of 1897 would be unusually early. Either the date or the stylistic label may be approximate. The online index of building projects held by the Archivio Storico della Città di Torino, which covers applications from 1780 to 1928, lists no project under Corso Regina Margherita 57. For 1897 it does list a palazzina on the corso at the corner of Via Rossini, designed by Giovanni Thermignon for Giovanni Sassi; Via Rossini meets the corso some 350 metres west of number 57, so that entry does not appear to concern this building. House numbers may have changed since the nineteenth century, so the archive search is not conclusive.
What is on record is the city’s judgement of the building. Turin’s town plan marks it among the buildings of particular historic interest outside the historic centre, in the second of its five groups, the one that includes houses, colleges, convents, palazzine, villas and small villas with gardens, and churches. The plan does not give a date or an architect for it.
What you see
We have not found a freely licensed photograph of the building, so we do not describe its street front. On the town-plan map the protected building is a compact block standing back from the corso, with a smaller building beside it towards the street. The hotel’s own photographs show an entrance under a round arch with a moulded surround, set in a wall rendered in a warm salmon colour, reached by a short wooden footbridge with metal handrails across a planted strip, with a white-flowering climber trained over the arch. Inside, the hotel shows art books open on small easels in the rooms, a reference to the painters after whom the rooms are named. The hotel also mentions rooms with a small balcony or a terrace, and rooms lit by roof windows under exposed beams.
Practical information
- The building is a hotel, the Hotel dei Pittori, with a restaurant; the interiors are for guests.
- The town-plan classification protects the historic building under the city’s planning rules; it is not a national listing.
- Photographs of the building are welcome: see the box below.
Getting there
Corso Regina Margherita is one of Turin’s main east–west routes and carries tram lines along much of its length. From number 57 the Mole Antonelliana is about 500 metres away on foot, through the streets of Vanchiglia, and Piazza Vittorio Veneto and the Po a little under a kilometre.
Nearby
- Corso Regina Margherita 43, about 180 metres east: an industrial building already standing at the end of the nineteenth century and reshaped around 1900–1910, first the seat of the Società anonima torinese fra consumatori di cartonaggio e affini, damaged by a bomb blast on 13 August 1943 and now the Gianni Rodari nursery school.
- The Fetta di polenta, Via Barolo, about 450 metres south: the narrow house that Alessandro Antonelli built in 1840 on a triangular plot and raised in 1881, once home of the Caffè del Progresso.
- Mole Antonelliana, about 500 metres south-west: designed by Antonelli in 1862 as a synagogue, finished by the city and today the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.
- Ponte Regina Margherita, at the eastern end of the corso, just under a kilometre away: a single 100-metre span of 1970–1972 that replaced the three-arched bridge of 1877–1882.
Do you know more?
On this page we have published what can be seen and what we were able to verify. We could not confirm the 1897 date, the Liberty style or the architect of this house, nor who built it and lived in it, and we have no free photograph of its front. If you know something — a name, a date, the building permit, the family who lived there, an old photograph, a document, a book that mentions it — write to Sofia, who looks after these pages.
Write to Sofia or send a message on WhatsApp
Please start your message with the title of this page, so it reaches the right file. Every contribution is checked against independent sources before it goes on the page, and we always say where a piece of information came from.
Sources
- Città di Torino, Piano Regolatore Generale, layer “Edifici di particolare interesse storico” of the PRG Azzonamento map service (queried on 30 September 2026): the building on this lot is classed “Edifici di rilevante valore storico”; the zoning layer returns “Zona Urbana Storico Ambientale 1”. See also Tavola n. 2, Edifici di interesse storico.
- PRG di Torino, Norme Urbanistico Edilizie di Attuazione, vol. I, coordinated text to 30 June 2023, art. 26: the five groups of buildings of particular historic interest and what group 2 includes.
- MuseoTorino, “Nuovo quartiere di Vanchiglia”: the Promis plan of 1851–1852, the canale dei canonici, building after 1865 and Antonelli’s company.
- MuseoTorino, “Torino Liberty”: the Liberty season in Turin conventionally dated from the exhibition of 1902.
- Archivio Storico della Città di Torino, online index of building projects (1780–1928): no entry for Corso Regina Margherita 57; entries for the corso in 1895–1899, including practice 101 of 1897 (palazzina at the corner of Via Rossini, owner Giovanni Sassi, designer Giovanni Thermignon).
- MuseoTorino, “Nuovo Ponte Regina Margherita”, “Scuola materna dell’infanzia Gianni Rodari” (Corso Regina Margherita 43), “La fetta di polenta” and “Mole Antonelliana”.
- Hotel dei Pittori, “Hotel” and “Camere”, official site: the owner’s account of the Liberty villa of 1897 and of the twelve rooms dedicated to painters; photographs of the entrance and rooms.
- Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali: no architectural record for the address.
- Wikipedia (it), Corso Regina Margherita: the course of the avenue and its tram lines.
- OpenStreetMap / Nominatim: position, returned as Hotel dei Pittori, 57, Corso Regina Margherita, Vanchiglia, Torino; building outlines on the lot.
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