Turin at first sight is not very interesting. Conforming rectangular 17th and 18th century business like looking buildings. All this regularity says the guide book because of the Romans who laid out this grid. But where are the remains of these Romans. No city I have been in shows less sign of its history. The Savoy family who ruled for years didn’t even seem to use bits of the past when building. All efficient and sparkly clean new at each stage apparently. A stroll up what is we are told one of the two main shopping streets first past solid fascist era buildings, then on to gracious piazzas, but past only every international luxury chain shops. We can only deduce that we are in Turin because we are walking under Turin’s trademark porticos.
But slowly Turin unfolds. It is not only proudly the centre of coffee, chocolate, Nutella, vermouth, aperitifs and Fiat, as they say, but also ‘elongated’ people. Shirley spots that no one but no one is either fat or obese, They all appear to have long legs and so we give them the names of ‘the elongated’. Is this connected with it being the area of the heart of the Slow Food movement? However up at the marvellous never ending market we feel more at home. There is the usual mix of thin, fat and obese people. And most of the latter seem unfortunately to be black or Asian women. And on the way there we spot a few ruins. Is someone at last digging up some of Turin’s Roman and other past?
Turin turns out to be rather nice. Lots of interest, public transport, human life and the river Po. And although we hadn’t time and energy to get there, Turin is changing and developing with new interesting areas. Previously run down and now trendy. So it is a live city.
We join the locals at the excellent bar across the square. We collect our sweet pastry [even the plain croissant is sweetish ], and of course only available until 11 am ,pay extra to sit whilst they all stand at the bar with their pastry and coffee. We sample the rather strange speciality a bicerin, and are presented with beautiful books on the history of chocolate, which does concede that it has and does exist in places other than Turin. A bicerin is a small glass of espresso coffee and chocolate topped with whipped cream.
We try to join in the local custom of aperitifs with large numbers of small plates [sort of tapas], and I probably get some food poisoning from eating their version of raw minced beef sitting on the pavement of a café highly recommended in the eight year old Lonely Planet from the library. If we had gone on Trip Advisor it would probably have warned us that was once grand is now very run down.