TORINO TURISMO
IS THE “ITALY NEXT DOOR” HIDDEN BEHIND THE ALPS?
Great coffee, lovely piazzas and arcades, a very walkable city centre, loads of palaces and museums – that’s Torino, our little-known neighbour.
In Geneva, we often speak of “France voisine”,
or the France next door, but what
about neighbouring Italy? The border is just
an hour or two from Geneva via Chamonix
and the Mont-Blanc tunnel. Torino by this
route is a solid three-hour drive starting from
Annemasse. (The drive is as bit longer via
Fréjus and its tunnel.) Either route, it is well
worth the trip.
The Mont-Blanc tunnel was closed for five
years after a disastrous fire in 1999. Now it is
entirely reconstructed and super-securityconscious:
all traffic is strictly limited to less
than 70 km/h speed, and cars are kept at 200-metre distances from one another. Cameras
record everything, and a radio channel can
be tuned to follow instructions throughout
the 20-minute drive. A return ticket through
the tunnel costs about 41 euros.
Once in Italy, the Aosta valley can be an interesting
day trip, but if you are headed for
Torino on the autostrada, there are still many
kilometres of tunnels to navigate. Northwestern
Italy, after leaving the alpine Aosta
valley, is not spectacular and, approaching
the city on the Torino-Aosta Autostrada, the
country is mostly flat and featureless.
No must-see?
The bustling city of Turin (a Piemontese
term, promoted as the more vivacious-sounding
“Torino” by the Winter Olympics in
2006), is very interesting, full of good food
and high fashion, window-shopping and history.
Mild spring weather makes May–June
an excellent time to visit.
Torino is also a city with a visibility problem,
especially vis-à-vis glamorous rival Milan.
Torino has no clearly defined tourist must-see – although they turn up quickly once you are
there. In a free-association test, many Europeans
would associate the city with Fiat
(whose T stands for “Torino”), the Agnelli
family and the Juventus football club, but
the rest of its image is vague. There is little
notion of, say, its great Egyptian museums
(“the biggest after Cairo”), which might attract
crowds elsewhere.
Classic piazzas
The Alps hedge Torino in to some degree;
the mountains are a steep natural barrier between
Italy and neighbours Switzerland and
France. This causes transport issues, with
Torino-bound flights landing first at Milan,
but trains also (Geneva–Torino takes from
seven to eleven hours by rail, via Brig and
Domodossola) stop first at Milano Centrale;
120–130 CHF a trip), taking it off the agenda
for weekend travellers. A long-delayed link
to other European train networks, including
the TGV, seems to have been shelved; a
large model at the Porta Nuova train station
showing elaborate new tunnels under the
Alps from Lyon to Torino has been dismantled.
All those tunnels would cost money,
which seems to be in short supply.
The central area of Torino includes classic
Italian piazzas, some ringed with arcades,
the best shopping streets of the city. The
style is decidedly Baroque and often French,
as Piedmont was capital of Savoy and even
a French department for a time under
Napoleon.
In spring and summer this part of the city is
especially alive, with crowds of young people
and families everywhere. And for a country
with a very low birth rate, there are prams
and strollers on all the stony streets. Via
Garibaldi features youthful pedestrian-mall
crowds, and thousands of portable phones
flourish. Meanwhile, the Via Roma links the
largest piazzas, with arcades and high-brow
fashion on all sides.
There is always great window-shopping and
food tasting. Torino is a capital of chocolate
and pastries, and people line up for the best
gelati.
Torino also borders the Po river, where rowers
scull along, right up to the rushing chute
below the Vittori o Emanue bridge. On
weekends and summer evenings the banks
of the Po offer a riot of cafés and clubs that
vibrate through the night, leaving an eerily
silent scene for the rowers in the morning.
Quite by accident, one March weekend we
came across a large chocolate festival on the
Piazza Vittorio Veneto. The clowns and street
circus performances hardly stood out from
the regular activities! A few blocks away, in
the multicultural commotion, we passed the
memorably named Il Po Kebab.
Outside the city centre, Torino can turn suddenly
gritty and less attractive. Officials have
been trying to rescue old industrial sites for
tourism and knowledge industries. One success
story has been the “Eataly” food fare on
an old Fiat manufacturing site south of the urban
core.
You might notice there has been little mention
above of museums and palaces, which
are abundant in Torino, or any other lofty historical
sightseeing. In the sunny Italian
spring, it may be best just to walk through
Torino and leave all that serious culture business
for a rainy day.
For more cultural background, try Corby Kummer’s detailed travel piece “Touring Turin” from The Atlantic monthly (1999): www.theatlantic.com/issues/99apr/9904turin.htm).
