Huge Project to Restore Italian Palace's Glory

For more than half a century, one of the world's biggest and most historically important gardens was left to degenerate into a wilderness.

The Reggia di Venaria Reale outside Turin is said to have provided Louis XIV with the inspiration for his palace at Versailles. But, by the end of the 1990s, the 80 hectares (200 acres) of land surrounding it had become little more than a wasteland. The geometric paths that criss-crossed the grounds were overgrown. The flower beds were lost under weeds. As for the vast, 250-meter-long fish pond, it had long since dried up and was barely discernible.

But yesterday, after eight years of painstaking work and a budget of €25m (£17m), 25 hectares of the reconstructed gardens were reopened to the public - the latest step in what the head of the regional government, Mercedes Bresso, has called "the biggest restoration project under way in Europe".

The restoration of the grounds is just one aspect of the €200m project to restore the complex. Some 120 architects and landscape gardeners have been employed and 40,000 trees and shrubs were planted.

It is planned to reopen parts of the palace, or reggia, itself in September, but the entire scheme is not expected to be completed until 2011. The regional government is hoping that eventually more than a million visitors a year will be drawn to the complex, which a member of the government described at the weekend as embodying "the baroque exaltation of beauty".

The Reggia di Venaria Reale was built as a summer residence and hunting lodge for the ruling family of the vanished duchy of Savoy and was begun in 1659. Like Versailles, part of its purpose was to inspire awe: the main building alone is bigger than Buckingham Palace.

The ruling house funded a publication, in which the reggia featured prominently, so that other parts of Europe could learn of the little duchy's might and resources. It described the reggia as a place in which the then duke, Carlo Emanuele II, had "concentrated all that could be needed for recreation". There were stables for 200 horses and kennels for as many hounds. The architect, Amedeo di Castellamonte, created a village in the grounds for the members of the court.

The reggia was attacked by French troops in 1693 and parts of it were destroyed. But the damage was repaired in the early part of the following century and the estate continued to be used by the Savoys, who had assumed royal status as rulers of the kingdom of Sardinia. After the Napoleonic invasion of Italy in 1796, however, the reggia and its grounds began a slow decline.

Neglected by the royal family, some buildings were used as stables by the army and in the second world war the reggia served as a barracks for German troops. By the 1960s, parts of it were providing shelter for immigrant workers from southern Italy.