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The Room of Views
The Room of Views

The Room of Views

The majestic reception room with its unique cycle of paintings

A stunning feature at the centre of Spezzano Castle is the Room of Views (Salla de Stati), which was frescoed in around 1596 by Cesare Baglione.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Marco III Pio (1567-1599), the final, restless lord of the independent State of Sassuolo, had portraits of the most important places of his domain painted in the main hall of the castle, presumably between 1595 and 1596: a sequence of a full 56 views depicting the smallest corners of his fiefdom, formed of the estates in Modena and in Sabina, received in 1595 as the dowry of his wife Clelia Farnese, who he married at Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola (Viterbo) on 2 August 1587.
Sala delle Vedute

The large room was decorated by Cesare Baglione, painter at the court of the Farnese family, an exponent of the Bolognese Mannerism style, specialised in landscape painting, with a cycle of paintings celebrating the power of the Pio di Savoia family through a depiction of the castles, towns and townships, from the plain to the mountains, of the State of the Pio, which was divided into five districts: Sassuolo, Spezzano, Formigine, Brandola and Soliera. The cycle of frescoes, which are geo icons and landscapes, concludes on the vault of the room with the depiction of a crowned woman, the personification of Pietas, with the quartered shield of Pio and the motto of the Pia dynasty, "Pia Soboles".

The restorations carried out in the nineteenth century resulted in removal of the paintings on the vault and the Pio family shield, which can just be glimpsed under the depiction of Spezzano. A combination of paintings and maps, the pictures bear precious testimony to the history of the area and the features of the buildings in the towns and countryside of the individual places