Turin: Initial Impressions

Our first day in the city was May first, which is International Labor Day in many countries including Italy, and therefore it's a national holiday. We went out in the late morning and saw the tail ends of at least one, probably two, demonstrations or parades by labor activists. (The protesters below are against the expansion of Treni ad Alta Velocità, high speed trains.)

Our goal was to do as much walking around the central parts of the city as we could that day, Wednesday, since rain was forecast for most of the day on Thursday. (In fact it remained sunny all Thursday morning, was merely cloudy in the afternoon, and rained buckets only after 7 p.m., causing at least one car alarm below our windows to go off repeatedly for extensive periods.)

Turin seems to be a pleasant northern city similar in some ways to Milan, with an open feeling of good feng shui deriving from wide streets, wide sidewalks, mostly low-rise buildings and abundant parking for those with both cars and two-wheeled vehicles. Like Bologna, it has a great many arcades over the sidewalks, from which we infer that the deluges of this evening are a frequent occurrence. The arcades range in degree of decorativeness but overall are attractive as well as utilitarian. A guidebook also compares the city to Paris for its street life and abundance of cafés. There are lots of parklike squares of greenery dotted about, as well as bigger parks. (Also there are a lot of graffiti, which remind me of Rome.)

Along the Po River there's a greenway that led Steve to remark, "Does this look to you like the Detroit of Italy?" It is indeed the center of Italy's automobile industry, where Fiat (an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) was founded in 1899. The company produces over a million and a half vehicles a year; much of its production is now elsewhere in Italy and in overseas locations such as Brazil, Argentina, Poland and Mexico. The Maserati factory is still in Turin, south of the city, and a tourist map for "Torino and Cars" shows seven sites of interest to car-minded tourists (the FIAT Historic Center, the National Automobile Museum, among others) south of the center of the city but near the river.

Turin is the capital of the Piedmont region in northern Italy, but for centuries before Italian reunification it was the capital city of the Duchy of Savoy, starting in 1563, and then of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was ruled by the Duchy of Savoy. After reunification, it briefly was the first capital of the united Italy, from 1861 to 1865. (You might not know that Florence then became the capital, until 1871 when the capital was moved to Rome following the defeat of the Papal States as terrestrial powers on September 20, 1870, which accounts for the presence of a Via XX Settembre in practically every Italian city.) While Turin was the Savoy capital, the palace of the House of Savoy was here, and when Italy was unified under its first king, Vittorio Emanuele II, the sixteenth-century palace became the royal palace. We haven't visited that yet but plan to as soon as possible, and this royal past has led some observers to compare the city to Vienna as well.