Palazzo Madama and Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine
Plan this ride
Recorded distance
229 km
Riding-time estimate
4 h 25
Journey
Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Turin it runs 229 km to Turin; allow about 4 h 25 of riding. The stops in between: Castello di Agliè, VI.1-Emissario, Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine and back through VI.1-Emissario. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,750 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Palazzo Madama
Turin was Italy's first capital, and the Palazzo Madama in the middle of Piazza Castello was its first parliament. When the kingdom was proclaimed in 1861, the Senate met in a room inside this strange building, a medieval castle with a baroque facade added in the early eighteenth century by the architect Filippo Juvarra. The name comes from the royal widows, the Madama Reali, who lived here in the seventeenth century, among them Christine of France. Today it houses the city's museum of ancient art, and the staircase and facade are among the most beautiful in Italy. The whole ensemble of Savoy residences in and around Turin is listed by UNESCO.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Palazzo Madama is where the day begins. Next is Castello di Agliè.
2. Castello di Agliè
Agliè is a small town in the Canavese, the hilly district north of Turin that spreads between the Po plain and the mouths of the Alpine valleys, and its castle is far grander than the town around it. Begun as a medieval fortress by the San Martino counts, it was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a baroque residence and later bought by the House of Savoy, who turned it into a summer palace with richly decorated rooms, a chapel, a theatre and a large park with fountains and a lake. It is part of the UNESCO listing of the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy, a ring of palaces around Turin, and Italian television viewers may recognise it from a popular costume drama filmed there.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Castello di Agliè comes up about 41 km into the recorded legs. Next is VI.1-Emissario, 35 km on.
3. VI.1-Emissario
Lago di Viverone is a small, warm lake in northern Piedmont, cupped inside one of the most remarkable glacial landforms in Europe. Ice flowing out of the Aosta Valley during the last glaciations dumped a vast ring of moraine here, the Morainic Amphitheatre of Ivrea, and its eastern wall, the Serra, runs for many kilometres as an almost perfectly straight wooded ridge. The lake sits at the foot of it, with the villages of Viverone and Azeglio on its shores and Ivrea around a quarter of an hour's ride to the northwest.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
about 78 km into the recorded legs you reach VI.1-Emissario. Next is Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine.
4. Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine
Oropa is a sanctuary on a scale that surprises everyone who comes up the valley from Biella for the first time. At almost twelve hundred metres, in a bowl of mountains, a vast complex of churches, courtyards, porticoes and pilgrim lodgings rises in terraces, built over several centuries around an ancient chapel that holds a Black Madonna, a wooden statue of the Virgin that legend attributes to St Luke. Above the main buildings, a Sacro Monte of chapels with life-size statues illustrates the life of Mary along a wooded path. It is one of the nine Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy listed by UNESCO in 2003, and one of the most important Marian shrines in the Alps.