The royal castle stands tall on top of a hill near Torino. It has been on Unesco’s World Heritage list with a few other residences of the House of Savoy since 1997. Davide Groppi collaborated with architects Beppe Merlano (from Archeostudio) and Maria Carla Visconti (from SBAPTo), as well as a team of experts, to come up with a lighting solution that would provide dynamic illumination of the spaces in the flat, using special versions of Davide Groppi lamps and totem for ambient lighting.

“The light in Vittorio Emanuele II’s flat at the castle of Moncalieri was designed to tell a story and describe a space that unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore. The lamps used to illuminate the walls and the light present in each single room change cyclically in a dynamic manner so as to create the correct levels of contrast and therefore allow the viewer to read both what is there now and what was there before. The light ‘that comes and goes’ is used to show first the true aspect of these rooms, which unfortunately have been severely damaged over time, and then to give a very specific idea of what they looked like before the fire.”