Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (Turin, 10 August 1810 – 6 June 1861) did not favour grand speeches. He preferred the card table, the English newspaper, and quiet conversation among intelligent people. It was for this reason that in 1842 he founded the Whist Club here, in Palazzo Solaro: inspired by the gentlemen's clubs of London, he wished to create a place where liberal-moderate nobles could talk away from the 'querulous and noisy promiscuity' of Caffè Fiorio.

It is said that Cavour was a whist player of extraordinary skill — and that he used the card game as a political metaphor: one must know one's own cards, sense those of one's opponents, and know when to play and when to wait. The same logic with which he guided European diplomacy towards Italian Unification.

He died at fifty, six weeks after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. He had seen the birth of what he had worked for all his life, but not long enough to govern it. Vittorio Emanuele II, at his bedside, reportedly said: 'Cavour was Italy.'

The deep green of this suite evokes the colours of the Counts of Cavour's coat of arms and the landscapes of their agricultural estates at Leri and Grinzane Cavour: the same land that Cavour transformed with modern methods, just as he would go on to transform the history of Italy.