France/Italy roadtrip – Stupinigi and Sacra di San Michele | alison richards

As always, I was up early and ready to leave at 8am. There was nothing more that I wanted to see near the Pavia area so drove on towards Turin. I had originally planned on going to Turin, but after the mess of yesterday and the roads of Milan being so crazy, I didn't want to encounter any more problems and avoided the city.

The next stop on my map after that was the Palazzina di caccia di Stupinigi, or 'The hunting residence of Stupinigi'. It took about an hour and 45 minutes to get there, and then was the fun task of finding parking. I'd read the night before that they were doing some renovations on the parking, and it was just chaos - you couldn't park in any of the designated parking areas, and the detour signs made no sense!

I ended up driving down a long road through a large park, probably that used to be part of the estate, where there were parking bays on either side. I parked up and then proceeded to try work out how to get back to the palace. Not finding any useful signage, I decided to follow a path in the general direction, then work it out. It was definitely not a very safe walk to the palace, and I really think they need to put in more signage, but helpful directions and information seem to be lacking across much of Italy....

I finally made it to the front of the palace, had to wait a couple of minutes before it opened, then went in and bought a ticket.

I've been to lots of palaces and chateaux and I definitely have my favourites. But this was high up there, its was so beautiful! The ceilings in particular were quite spectacular, as were all the details and the trompe l'oeil. Have a look for yourself...

Inside the first room, Sala Scudieri. As this was a hunting lodge, there were motifs depicting hunting everywhere

The door from the Sala Scudieri into the central room under that big dome!

Inside the Salone Centrale. The walls and ceiling were painted in trompe l’oeil style, meaning that you had to look twice to see if something was an architectural detail, or painted decoration

This would have been the central room for parties, as there were doors to the front of the palace, doors to the garden beyond, and six doors around the room that led to other rooms. It was very well designed.

Trompe l’oeil of the fireplace. Just to demonstrate how good it was, those columns either side of the fireplace were actually flat, and the grooves were painted on!

The ceiling of the Appartamenti della Regina

You might think the doors are hanging weirdly. This was for a reason – the doors were solid and hanging them like this made them easy to close. But they did look odd.

Part of the ceiling of the Appartamento del Re

This beautiful piece of furniture was in the Appartamento del Re

The view from the Corridoio Appartamenti del Re

Beautiful wallpaper inside the Gabinetto

Door details. There wasn’t any surface that wasn’t beautifully decorated!

The beautiful cabinet inside the Sala del Bonzanigo

Another angle, it was just too gorgeous!

Salla del Prospettive. The trompe l’oeil painter had gone mad inside this room, painting imagined scenes and basically all the details inside the room!

The Gabinetti Cinesi. Hand-painted wallpaper scenes depicting a romanticised, “exotic” China.

So now we come to what was my favourite room in this palace, and quite possibly my favourite room of any place I've been to. The Sala Degli Specchi, or hall of mirrors, was not imposing in the scale of Versailles, nor really particularly mirrored. The only thing that was really reflective was the ceiling... and it was so absolutely beautiful!

The mirrors were joined together by the most delicate porcelain

Lastly, it was onto the large Sala da Gioco, with its colourfully painted panels featuring exotic birds.

So there you have it! The beautiful hunting lodge of Stupinigi... I'd be pretty happy to live there!

If you're interested, you can actually do a 360 degree virtual tour, which is how I got all the names of the rooms! It's not colour-graded like my photos, but it gives a pretty good representation of walking through the palace. Going through it made me remember how happy all the pretty little details made me. I would especially recommend looking at the Sala del Prospettive, as I didn't really capture how overwhelming it is! Link here.

The only thing left to do now was to take a photo out the front, and go and find some lunch!

Luckily, right opposite the Palazzina was a little cafe. You could go in and order certain bits from a buffet to make your own plate. I had a weird concoction of different things, but it was all rather tasty. Then I set about getting back to the camper. It turned out that there was a safer route back to where I'd left it through the little town of Stupinigi.

I got back to the camper about 1:30pm, then set my GPS for a Lidl nearby to pick up supplies, and head off to Sacra di San Michele.

If you look this up, its a giant abbey on top of a mountain. It's really quite high up. Unfortunately, you can only really show this through a drone photo I think. There were also very few places along the long road uphill to take photos of it. Never mind, I got to a parking area then, legs burning, walked the rest of the way to the abbey uphill. What a workout!

The abbey was built between 983 and 987 on the top of mount Pirchiriano, but the idea of anyone building something of this scale at that time of human history is just so mind-blowing. I paid for a ticket and went inside to learn more.

This is the Stairway of the Dead. It was so called because the niches in the walls used to house the skeletons of dead monks, but they were removed from view about 80 years ago.

Around the door at the top were some amazing carvings, but the harsh light outside and the darkness of the staircase meant they were too hard to photograph. This doorway is called the Portal of Zodiacs. Carved between 1128 and 1130, the right features the twelve signs of the zodiac while the left has the southern and northern constellations.

Painting from sometime between 1500 and 1600 depicting a unicorn!

The only photo I managed to get, this was quickly snapped from the road as I was driving downhill. Thankfully, it’s a quiet road!

From there it was time to find somewhere to camp. I'm happy to say that this was my last campsite on Italian soil - they were mostly too expensive for what they were and the facilities were not very good! This last one was also bloody awful, so I was very glad to get back to France tomorrow!

Campsite: Camping Aviglianalacs

Rating: 1/10. Poor facilities, the showers were a mess and always wet due to bad design. Toilets ran out of toilet paper. Dishwashing facilities were terrible. Site itself was ok, but just on dirt. Backed onto a large field where 50 or so kids were camping. Expensive. Go somewhere, anywhere, else.