The casual visitor to Turin these days might be surprised to find a city going full throttle. After all, for most of the last century, Turin’s fortunes ebbed and flowed according to the alternating vicissitudes of the city’s chief employer, Fiat, the carmaker that has progressively steered itself into the red.
Paradoxically, the crisis at Fiat forced local administrators to come up with a “plan B” for Turin’s future, one that would also conclusively shake off the city’s image as an industrious but rather drab place.
Enter “Turin, Back to the Future,” or, how to draw on a city’s past to construct its present.
Long gone are the heady years when Turin basked as the emblem of Italy’s postwar industrial miracle and local administrators made more of state-of-the-art production lines than the state of the city’s art. Today Turin is looking to hook tourists, stealing them away from the usual Rome-Florence-Venice package tour with lures that play on its history as the former Savoy capital and its current status as the capital of gastronomic pleasures and contemporary art in Italy. And Turin is successfully positioning itself to filmmakers as an alternative to Rome’s “Hollywood on the Tiber,” a return, it hopes, to the celluloid celebrity it enjoyed a century ago.
The National Cinema Museum in the Mole Antonelliana, the distinctively spire-topped construction that’s the symbol of Turin, is itself a sign of Turin’s renaissance. The museum opened four years ago, amid much fanfare, and houses a fascinating jumble of film paraphernalia and short clips detailing the history of the silver screen from its origins to the present.
Very entertaining and at times a little kitsch — just like movies ought to be — the museum has the added bonus of being inside the world’s tallest brick building. Conceived in 1863 by Alessandro Antonelli as a synagogue, it was never used as such and remained mostly abandoned until this latest reincarnation. A glass elevator at the center of the dome flies through the air to a lookout terrace that affords a breathtaking view of the city and surrounding mountains.
One lesson Turin picked up from Fiat is the importance of having new models when you have tough competition. Despite its fair share of artistic treasures decking the walls of former royal palaces or hunting lodges, and a much-neglected Egyptian museum with one of the best collections in the world, Turin can’t boast of having a Sistine Chapel, Rialto Bridge or Uffizi Gallery to pull in vacationing big-spenders.
So the city has taken the opposite direction, funneling energy and cash into promoting itself as Italy’s — and one of Europe’s — happening hub for contemporary art. It’s been a successful gambit so far, mostly because Turin has managed to effectively combine the means of both public and private sectors.
Alongside numerous private galleries catering to the needs of affluent collectors, visitors with a taste for the up-and-coming can visit the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), the municipal museum that proudly emblazons the neon logo “All art is contemporary,” or the Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum, inside a former medieval fortress overlooking Turin whose transformation into a Savoy residence was stunted during an 18th-century restoration. The museum has its own collection and a packed calendar of temporary exhibitions.
Among the latest additions to Turin’s art firmament is the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a private art foundation that opened the doors to its museum two years ago. Located on the site of an abandoned industrial site, Claudio Silvestrin’s sleek and mutable space is the ideal receptacle for those unwieldy installations that many contemporary artists feel compelled to create.
The architect Renzo Piano topped his own recent restructuring of Fiat’s historic Lingotto plant (from one of Europe’s largest factories into a shopping center-cum-university-faculty-cum-conference center), with the so-called Scrigno, or jewel box. This box-like structure suspended on the roof of the Lingotto houses part of the Agnelli family’s private art collection — their tastes include Picasso, Matisse, Dali, among others — as well as temporary exhibits.
Turin also seems determined to regain its rightful place in the nation’s gastronomic pantheon, fueled in part by the enthusiastic reception given to the Slow Food movement — based in nearby Bra — by our fast-food society.
Actually local culinary excellence can best be appreciated pre- and post-meals.
We have Turin to thank for delicious meal finales, and sweet treats like marrons glaces, chocolates and candies. Tradition even has it that zabaione — the battle-horse of Italian creams — was created by a Franciscan monk, Fra’ Pasquale de Baylon, during a Turin stay. Local sweet and pastry production is still going strong, as a stroll through the city’s pastry-shop lined streets will attest.
The bicerin, which means small glass, is a typical local alternative to the cappuccino. The secret of this breakfast favorite whose roots have been traced to the 18th century, is a balanced blend of chocolate, coffee and milk. It’s worth making the trip to the coffeeshop Al Bicerin, in Piazza della Consolata, for both taste and ambience.
Turin also gave the world the aperitivo, reason enough to be eternally grateful to Antonio Benedetto Carpano, who concocted the first vermouth in 1786 when he added a secret mix of herbs and spices to the local white wine.
“Punt e mes,” a vermouth variant, also came out of the Carpano stable, and other local companies, like Martini&Rossi, Cinzano and Gancia, brought global recognition to their hometown product.
Aperitivo hour in Turin bears no relation to the stingy pay-for-your-own-potato chips version found in much of southern Italy, and Rome in particular. Here, aperitivi are mini-meals in their own, all you can eat smorgasbords where hot new bars vie for clients with Turin’s elegant historic cafeDs.
Turin’s post-work social scene is concentrated in a few key areas, the so-called Quadrilatero, which defines the old Roman city, the Docks Dora, a former railroad and industrial area next to the railway to Milan full of alternative and punk clubs, and the Piazza Vittorio Veneto and the nearby Murazzi, a bustling strip of outdoor clubs and bars along the banks of the Po river that is especially popular when the weather gets warmer, mosquitoes permitting.
With the Winter Olympics only two years away — in 2006 — and construction crews working round the clock, city administrators believe that within a decade Turin will sport a whole new look. If progress continues at the current clip that prediction is likely to prove true.
