Visiting Turin in October, 2016

We were in Torino in April 2014 - unfortunately it was Easter Sunday and Monday so practically everything was closed. With that said, the Palazzo Reale turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip, which included Provence, Florence and Verona. The armory collection in particular is outstanding. The old town itself is beautiful - the 19th century architecture in the central city reminded me of Paris. The Duomo with the Shroud of Turin is in the same square as the Palazzo Reale - worth a look. The "real" shroud is rarely on display, however. I really wish we had spent more time in Torino, or at least picked better days.

We stayed in the Hotel Dock Milano, which was across from the north train station. I liked everything about it except for one guy at the front desk who wouldn't try to suggest a restaurant that might be open on Easter night and dismissed us with a shrug. Other than that, the staff was fine.

We are on our way there tomorrow! When I get back I will try to post, but here are a few resources for you.

What to do with 36 hours in Turin

Guardian Readers' Tips

Italy's Forgotten City this one's a little old (2011), but Torino hasn't changed much.

The city's tourism site is helpful for current and planned events.

I also found a little book on Kindle for about $3.99, "Piemonte & Valle d'Aosta Rough Guides Snapshot." Found our hotel on Booking.com. You can PM me in a week and I'll fill you in on details, if you like.

Torino is an amazing city! Have been twice and would love to go back!

Look at the links provided in the above post, good suggestions. The tourism website is very good!

You may want to consider purchasing the Torino + Piedmont card.
http://www.turismotorino.org/card/EN/home

we stayed in an apartment both times so can't recommend hotels.

enjoy!

Depending on your interests, some of the things we enjoyed on our five days there were:

The world class automobile museum where even non car fanatics like myself drooled over the vehicles.

The Egyptian museum - one of the best in the world and it has only recently undergone a massive renovation so should be even better.

The Shroud of Turin museum. You will only see a copy of the he shroud but this small museum, that included a short tour and film was interesting.

The National Cinema Museum housed in the magnificent Mile Antonelliana.

A tour of the Juventus football club stadium and attending a Juventus game (Torino are the other big club in the city if you cannot get into a Juventus game).

Wandering around the beautiful colonnaded streets of the city.

The Royal palaces.

Visit one of the grand cafes such as Caffe Torino. Try the famous Torino drink called Bicerin.

Visiting the chocolate shops.

Make sure you go for apertivo. This link is a bit old but gives you the idea: http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2009/mar/05/aperitivo-turin-food-drink-italy

September 2015.
Lyon to Turin by train, and this one is not going at 300 km/hr. It winds its way through the Alps, and it delightfully scenic. You can feel how the train is climbing, passing through a few small towns, and the largest at Chambery, half a dozen stops between Lyon and Turin. The countryside looks for all the world like a model railroad scene, at least on the French side, and it’s hard to tell if French farmers are into farming or landscape gardening, as everything looks so neat and well tended. The Alps are pure limestone, and it’s been quarried for centuries, millennia. I don’t see it running out any time soon, and the rivers are cloudy with lime.

It all looks a bit more gritty on the Italian side.

We came to Turin to see the museum of Egyptian antiquities, and it did not disappoint. We bought two-day museum passes, which cost about 30 euro per pass, and are really good value, as they give admission to some twenty museums and sights in Turin, which would otherwise cost about ten euro a hit.

The Egyptian Antiquities museum has been reorganised and completely renovated, re-opening just a few months ago. It is excellent, and has a lot to say about not only antiquities, but also how a collection is curated, organised, displayed and also how “gaps” in the collection have been filled. The stories of the leaders of the excavation “campaigns” are told, along with photographs of the digs in progress, perhaps in 1903. I was very taken by a particular stone sarcophagus, and there was a photo of a team of workers dragging it out of the excavation, a photo of the leader of the excavation, and a copy of his diary notes. The complete story, provenance clearly displayed.

Mostly the display is about the content of graves. Given that people were buried with all the tools, furniture, food and amulets that they would need in the Afterlife, grave contents can be seen as a fair representation of Egyptian life way back when.

The museum has some great systems in place. You automatically get an audio guide, or rather an audio plus visual guide, so the audio might say “The pattern on the screen right now means etc.”, so it makes it easy to interpret the displays. We spent about four hours there, leaving mainly on account of tiredness.

One recuperates. The Palazzo Madama is the Civic museum of Turin, right in the middle of town. Built (or at least part of it was built) as a city gate, but as the city extended, the gate function was no longer needed. It incorporates Medieval, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods, and again, is great. The Medieval garden has been recreated, and it is a gardener’s delight. Plantings of medicinal herbs (apparently the shape of the leaf corresponds to the organ it will treat. Flat leaves for hepatitis, more circular stems and leaves for varicose veins), plus espaliered pear trees, culinary herbs, compost heaps and a pig sty (sans pigs).

Stroll along the Po, draining to the Venetian lagoon, where we will be in a week. There was some sort of ferry service once from Turin to Venice, 30 hours outbound, but 60 hours return, against the flow.

We got a bit side tracked, walking past the Mole Antonelliana, the building with the big spire, the symbol of Turin. Originally commissioned as a synagogue, but as the costs escalated, and the architect had continually changing ideas, the clients, the Jewish residents of Turin, terminated the contract. I think they got grumpy about having a synagogue with a temporary roof, and architects can be a bit difficult like that. Negotiate with the Civic authorities, find a new plot for the synagogue, and Turin gets to decide what to do with the half completed Works. A museum maybe, maybe a Risorgimento museum, and now a cinema museum.

The cinema museum is enlightening and fun. (Also it has a good café in the basement, and you don’t need a museum ticket to access the café.) There is a display that demonstrates the archeology of the moving picture, from the first Indonesian shadow puppets, through the whole business of optics, shadow lantern displays, stereo postcards (including some very risqué samples from Paris, 1855, right through to the first movies, invented by Lumiere. There’s a fun quote from Lumiere senior;”You’re wasting your time with this, son. Cinema will never amount to anything.” Hey said the same about email, I suppose.

The story of Italian Realism cinema is shown, walking up a long circular ramp, like walking up a strip of film. Realism, with its genesis in the late 30’s, some films shot in Berlin in 1946 or 47 (you’d be hiring your extras with nylons and Luckies then), moving on to “The Bicycle Thieves”. That’s a whole genre of cinema that I know precious little about, and it’s never featured in the Australian film vernacular. The closest English language films that I can think of approaching it would be “The loneliness of the long distance runner” or “Kes”, both films based on Alan Sillitoe books.

Again, a well curated exhibition.No audio guide here, but take a fully charged iPhone with you. There is free wi-fi in the museum, and each display has a QR code. Shoot the code and listen or read about what you are seeing.

For five euro, you can ride the elevator to the top of the dome. The panorama is great, surrounded by Alps (on a clear day), and Turin laid out like a carpet. The cinema museum was never on our “to do” list here, and we really got very lucky.

We skipped through the Royal Palace and Armoury fairly quickly. I have to confess that Baroque and Rococo just don’t do it for me, and the residence of a bunch of Royals is, for me, hard to approach. I think it is my ignorance of Italian history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that makes it opaque for me. Italians, steeped in the history of the Risorgimento, would see it very differently.

Turin is great, even though we have only three nights here. Off to Genoa / Genova in the morning.

And it’s nice to be in Italy. Feels sort of like home.

See my trip report from last September:

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/turin-5-days-in-september

Enjoy Turin- it's well worth the visit.

Hi Tom,
Turin is a very nice city.
-Do not miss the Egyptian Museum which is the most beautiful museum of Egyptian art after Cairo
- Do not miss the Museum of the cinema ( Mole)
- Do not miss Basilica di Superga
- if you like mountain hiking ( must be very fit), go with a mountain guide in the Val de Susa
- another nice thing to do is to visit the Langhe region, in the South of Turin. You can also go truffle hunting in autumn.
I could also give you some advice for restaurants or hotels in Turin.