The School

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The current architectural structure of the School has remained almost faithful to the original one. The initial project (1756) by the architect Questa had a baroque style. The building, hosting the new San Luca Monastery in the past, was ended in 1765 with final adjustments to the elegant baroque cornice of the windows. The architect Questa designed an H-shape building with the two major sides oriented from north to south and linked by a central body oriented from east to west. In that way there were two different courtyards. In the first courtyard to the south, known today as the “honour courtyard”, there is a statue of Giulio Cesare donated in 1935 by the War Ministry on the occasion of the opening of the School. In the main entrance hall there is a simple sacrarium with three commemorative plaques engraved by the names of all the fallen Cadets from the Third War of Independence to the Resistance. Along the sides of the entrance other two commemorative plaques are engraved by the eighteen names of the Cadets decorated with a Golden Medal to the Military Valour. The second courtyard to the north is dedicated to Ugo Foscolo, friend and military companion of General Teulié, and since 1996 it has been equipped as multifunctional area. The rest of the barracks, that is the complexes to the west that enclose the previous Piazza d’Armi (today the courtyard of the “First Italian Flag”), they have been originated after the great renovation of the building in 1935. The first renovation affected the stables that where changed into billets; the second one, during the fascist period, led up to the construction of a pavilion, oriented from east to west and destined today to the library, the meeting rooms and the honour hall, and to the construction of the gym. This building is a half-cylinder with other two pavilions along its sides, destined to host the canteen and the fencing gym. The gym frontal façade was completed with a wide balcony and a fronton. Today, from the architectural point of view, the most interesting parts of the complex are the honour courtyard, the façade and the honour staircase. The bright façade is majestic and harmonious with granite portals among which the central one is the most impressive. The other central windows of the façade, only at the first floor, are decorated with arch-shaped cymatium. The honour staircase is the most majestic and decorative element of all the building, with rose granite of Baveno and a rose marble balustrade towards the Conference Room at the upper floor. At the ledge there is the cenotaph of General Teulié realized by architect Giovanni Battista Chiappa. The library of the “Teulié” Military School has got five wide rooms and it collects 75,000 volumes on different topics: human sciences, scientific books, encyclopedias, magazines, law collections, cartography and military history. All the volumes come from the Savoy, after the region was ceded to France, through the transfer of the Chambery Fund, a rich military library in Milan. Later the books of the Milan Preside Fund and the Adolfo Casanova Fund, about military history, have been included. The manuscripts are 31 and the most ancient, with the original ligature, dates back to 1407; among them there is a memo written by Cavour in 1859, a dispatch by Metternich and a proclamation by Lord Wellington in 1814. There are also books dating back to the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, with a series of volumes by Giovanbattista Piranesi and his son Francesco; the most famous one is the “Traiana Column”, but there are also the “Rhymes” by Torquato Tasso (1580) and a volume with the projects for the construction of the Scala by Giuseppe Piermarini.