Obiad en famille publiczny i prywatny na dworze sabaudzkim w XVIII w.
Public and Private Dinner en famille at the Court of Savoy in the eighteenth century.

Summary/Abstract: In the last years of the reign of Victor Amadeus II (1675–1730) the Savoy court experienced the decline of public dining of the ruler. From the 1720s the Savoy rulers predominantly dined in private, en famille, at most in the presence of ladies-in-waiting and the serving staff. Through the course of the 18th century, as the Versaille etiquette was getting more and more criticised, the Savoy court with its own customs became the platform for frequent confrontations. Frenchmen based in Turin, such as Pierre-Jean Grosley (1718–1785) and Charles Pinot Duclos (1704–1772), as well as Luigi Antonio Caraccioli (1721–1803), a Neapolitan settled in France, compared both courts, the Bourbon and the Savoy ones, expressing consistent preference for the latter. They linked the welcomed changes to the more modest and less formalised etiquette at the Savoy court as compared to the French one, which also resulted in measurable benefits, namely lesser expenses of running of the court.

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