Eventually Turin, and Another Apartment

I was at first a little unsure whether to say Turin or Torino, when speaking English. In Italian, while we're here, it goes without saying, we say Torino. But in English, I suppose, just as it sounds affected to say "Firenze" or "Paree," such would be the case with saying "Torino," and so it must be Turin. If there weren't an English equivalent, as with, I don't know, say, Positano, there would be no alternative (except, I suppose, one could say "Posi-TAH-no" in as strongly Italian an accent as possible, which would be affected too).

On Tuesday, after spending a couple of hours at the Ambrosian Library (which, conveniently, is just around the corner from our hotel) we collected our luggage from the hotel and took a cab to the railroad station. We already had our reserved tickets for particular seats on the 2:28 train to Turin, so all we had to do there was to wait for the platform for that train to be announced, but we waited and waited and waited, and a lot of people were getting restive. The train was five minutes delayed, and platforms were announced for trains leaving well after ours was supposed to, but still no platform for us. Eventually, of course, the train we would be on arrived in the station, unloaded, and we all could get on, including our two rather large and heavy suitcases and those of many other people. The train had inadequate space for big suitcases, but nothing bad happened with it all stacked in the aisles. From the train we could faintly see the Alps in the distance.

The journey was really short, only about 40 minutes. They announced at one point over the PA system that they had made up the five minute delay. And the way they did it was by going really fast. The speedometer reading in each car of the train registered between 260 and 300 kilometers per hour for most of the distance. (I.e., between 161 and 186 miles per hour.) We and at least half the others on the train disembarked at the Porta Susa stop, the first of two stops in Turin.

Steve had been told by the owner of our Turin apartment to get off at Porta Susa, that it was a short walk, so we didn't try to find a cab, but between hard-to-follow directions Steve had been given and different but inaccurate directions given to Steve at a car rental agency near the station (if only they'd had a map to give him, as most car rental agencies do!) we couldn't find the place. Subsequent inquiries of people on the streets failed to find anyone who knew where the street was that we were seeking, so we did quite a lot of walking around on a quite warm day pulling wheelie suitcases. (Steve later decided he could count it as an exercise day.)

Eventually, of course, we found the building (the street is a relatively significant street, so I don't know why nobody knew where it was, except that it changes its name for part of its length), and it is just fine. It's a seven-floor building of some age --three hundred years? four? -- we're not good at estimating the age of buildings that have had a lot of work done on them at various intervals. The cage elevator is probably between fifty and a hundred years old, but it's reasonably fast and big enough to accommodate us and all our luggage in one trip.

The apartment itself has been renovated completely quite recently, with appliances, tiles, kitchen cupboards, etc., that look brand new and all work perfectly. It is clearly not a place that anybody lives, being devoid of homey touches and having no charm at all, but it's very functional and spacious. (Steve notes that the parquet floor squeaks in a "reassuringly old" way.) The room that is kitchen, dining room and living room has some touches of red, including the ceiling fan. There are two bedrooms, all white except for touches of brown that pick up the dark wood frames of the mirrored closet doors.

The big entrance hall, which is largely wasted space, has a big curlicued coat rack that we have used, in conjunction with coat hangers, as a clothes drying rack, since the agent provides no indoor drying rack, his preferred way for us to dry clothes being a four-strand clotheslines reached by a balcony. As we're four flights up, we are a little leery of having any laundry item drop to the inner courtyard below, whence we would probably never be able to recover it, as we have no direct access to the courtyard.

It's conveniently situated within walking a fifteen-minute walk of most things we want to see.