Villa Lascaris

The villa built by Agostino Lascaris did not occupy the entire area of today's complex, but only the part from the garden. The side to the street was formed from low service areas such as kitchens, serviced cottages, caravan shelter, stables, located on the sides of the monumental portal and doorway that Giovanni Calvetti had embellished with the four-season polychrome clay reliefs .
The abandoned stones throughout the garden are many, strategically positioned to serve as a seat; this is the railing of the railing belonging to the outer staircase of the castle. Also in the old medieval building are the columns and other marble and stone remains scattered throughout the garden, as well as the high central tower and the parapet that draws the foundations of the doorman on the wall. Not far from this turret, we find the statue of Saint Maximus, an ancient bishop of Turin, who looks to the diocese he founded. At the center of the park, there is a fountain that used the old watering pumps of the castle, which was engraved by the Marquis, when, at the end of the eighteenth century, a child, a servant's son drowned. Not far from the bathtub a statue depicting Jupiter in the act of casting its lightning. The park originally had an extension of 40 000 m2, ie 11 days in Piedmont.
Towards the end of 1800 a party was donated to the parish for the execution of the oratory. When the site, with its still residential chateau, belonged to the Simiana, the garden was Italian style, with square flower beds and regularly pruned hedges and an ornamental fountain with water games. After the construction of the villa, the garden was transformed into landscaped parkland in English, where the formal rigidity of man is completely replaced by a garden where everything must look like natural, in which the creative force and beauty must in fact manifest itself of nature, creating visions even outward, with a kind of continuity with the countryside and woods surrounding the villa. Today, some elements of the old Italian garden survive.
One of the most important rooms in the Villa is the "Tricks Room", as it was then called today "Billiard Hall", dedicated to the memory of Francesco Giuseppe Maria Vincenzo Lascaris, father of Marquis Agostino. Inside there are frescoes made after 1823 by Fabrizio Sevesi and Luigi Vacca. The room is divided into three areas by two simple balustrades: the two sides were reserved for ladies wishing to attend billiard games on the large table in the center. The floor is in parquet with simple oak strips, very worn.