Galleria Sabauda

The Galleria Sabauda began as the private picture collection of the House of Savoy, the family that ruled Piedmont and would later provide the kings of a united Italy. Much of its core came from one soldier-collector, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the general who fought the Ottomans and the French for the Habsburgs and spent his rewards on art.

The result is one of the finest gatherings of Flemish and Dutch painting in Italy, from fifteenth-century panels to the age of Rubens and Van Dyck. Among its treasures is a small early Rembrandt of an old man asleep, one of very few paintings by him in an Italian public collection, alongside the polished cabinet pictures of Leiden masters like Gerrit Dou.

Since 2014 the gallery has hung in the Manica Nuova, a long newer wing of the Royal Palace in Turin, so you now see these northern pictures inside the working heart of the old Savoy court.