Agliè

Agliè sits in the Canavese, thirty-five kilometers north of Torino on the foothills above the Po plain. The d'Agliè family held the fortified core from 1259, and the conversion to a Sabauda residence began in the mid-1600s under Count Filippo San Martino d'Agliè, favourite of the Regent Christine of France. The castle later entered the UNESCO list of Savoy Residences, one of fourteen royal sites recognised together as a single serial property, and its gardens grew alongside it, enlarged in the nineteenth century with terraced Italian and English layouts.

The town's other center of gravity lies apart from the castle, at a country house on the edge of the commune where a Crepuscolar poet kept his own quiet ground. The centro storico adds a third note, a confraternity church faced in glazed terracotta from nearby Castellamonte. The town carries the Bandiera Arancione of the Touring Club, a place where a Savoy court seat, a poet's retreat, and a working parish church occupy the same small radius without competing for it.