The history of the Turin Palace Hotel
Professionalism and refinement since 1872
A few years later, in 1872, with the city’s new growth and the construction of the great railway junction of Porta Nuova, Constantino Kraft took this villa and oversaw its transformation into the hotel “Grande Albergo Torino”, a famous place for the foreign upper class on journey.
Actually the trade for the India passed through Turin, which was an obliged stop of the “Compagnia dei Vagoni Letto” on the Brindisi-Lione-Paris-London line. And on the hotel’s guest book we thus find the signatures of a Maharajah, in Turin in 1876, and of the Prince of Wales, in 1889.
After the Crown Prince of Denmark in 1892, at the Grand Hotel de Turin also stayed the unfortunate Sissi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria. In the same year we find the signatures of King Leopold II of Belgium, Princess Clementine and the Duc d’Orleans.
In 1904 Mr. Natale Ramondetti acquired the property of the hotel, which was closed for repairs and after a year the hotel was reopened with the addition of the word “Palace”, to distinguish it from the city’s other grand hotels.
Then the Turin Palace Hotel became more a patrician residence than a hotel, thanks to the addition of valuable works of the seventeenth century: mirrors, console tables, Chinese vases and rare watercolours in silk.
The Turin Palace Hotel attracted attention from the beginning of the Century for the construction of the ball room, the additional storey of one floor and for the careful refurbishing ended in 1987, which brought to the sight the precious woods, the silks, the marbles and the tapestry of the past.
In more recent times the Turin Palace Hotel has hosted HM the King of Sweden, Carl Gustaf, who treated Piedmontese entrepreneurs to a sumptuous Swedish smorgasbord. It is currently frequented by ministers and politicians, artists, musicians, pop stars like the Rolling Stones, Sting, and Madonna, and leading entrepreneurs and industrialists from every part of the globe.