Palazzo Barolo

The Barolo palace (also Palazzo Falletti di Barolo) is a patrician residence in Turin. It is home to the Barolo Opera which, according to the will of the Marchesa Giulia, has the task of continuing the activities of promoting human and social service that Giulia and her husband Tancredi had started.

The building, which stands in Via delle Orfane, was built at the end of the seventeenth century by Gian Francesco Baroncelli as a renovation of the house already owned by Count Ottavio Provana di Druento, "first squire" and "great guardarobiere" of Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy .

In the palace lived the only daughter of Count Ottavio, Elena Matilde, with her husband, Marquis Gabriele Falletti di Barolo who, with three children born in the marriage, left the palace and his wife when the father-in-law did not give his daughter the rich dowry already promised at the time of marriage.At age 26, Elena Matilde committed suicide by throwing herself out of her bedroom window.

In 1727 it was inherited by Ottavio Giuseppe, the eldest son of Elena and Gabriele Falletti di Barolo, who entrusted the modification to Benedetto Alfieri around the middle of the eighteenth century to adapt it to the rococo style. The palace was the residence of the Falletti family up to the married couple Tancredi (who died in 1838) and Giulia di Barolo (who died in 1864), with whom the family died out. They left the palace at the Opera Pia Barolo foundation.