Benedetto Alfieri came to Turin almost by chance — he was trained as a jurist, not an architect — and in 1739 found himself succeeding the great Filippo Juvarra as First Civil Architect to the King of Sardinia. A title that placed him at the centre of every important Savoyard court commission for nearly thirty years: the Teatro Regio, the interiors of the Royal Palace, La Venaria, Stupinigi, Palazzo Falletti di Barolo.

His method was precise and almost obsessive: he did not decorate spaces, he orchestrated them. His façades remain severe, classical, measured; it is in the interiors where everything changes. He used mirrors to multiply light, calibrated proportions with meticulous care, designed staircases and octagonal drawing rooms capable of pleasantly disorienting the eye. The drawings of the Teatro Regio appeared in Diderot's Encyclopédie — an exceptionally rare European recognition for a court architect.

Around 1756 he was called to transform Palazzo Solaro. The gallery and the octagonal drawing room still admired today bear his signature: they are among the few intact Rococo interiors remaining in Turin, and proof of what it meant, in eighteenth-century Savoyard culture, to live according to the taste of the court. Alfieri was also the uncle of the poet Vittorio Alfieri — the difficult temperament, it is said, ran in the family.