VILLA IL PASSATEMPO DELLE DAME DI VERRUA

The villa was built by Count Giuseppe Augusto Scaglia di Verrua in the last decade of the 1600s for his wife Giovanna Battista de Luines, whose French origin partly influenced the structure and internal furnishings. A beautiful perspective of the building, as it appeared two centuries ago, was published in the "Vedute di Torino" collection by Count Sclopis del Borgo in 1774.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the villa was renovated and enhanced by the Marquis Giovanni San Martino della Motta, husband of the last Verrua heir. The two-storey reconstruction with two horseshoe-shaped wings reveals, in its harmonious and severe lines, the neoclassical taste of the time and the San Martino coat of arms decorates the pediment. In the central body of the building a staircase with symmetrical ramps leads from the "perron" to the main floor of the villa where large windows give light to the hall of honor where an imposing marble basin, a large fireplace decorated with ceramics from the ancient Piedmontese factories and a majestic wooden sculpture representing the battle of Vienna in 1683 stand out.
The main chapel, on the side of the villa, with an octagonal plan, probably dates from the eighteenth-century. Outside, a park of centuries-old plants, where avenues and paths go between cedars, elms, poplars, cypresses, oaks and ponds, surrounds the villa. The villa then passed to the Balbo Bertone Counts of Sambuy and, in 1894, to the family of the current owners.