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Parco Del Valentino And The Museo Dell’automobile
The scruffy porticoes of Via Po lead down to the river from Via Roma, ending just before the bridge in the vast arcaded Piazza Vittorio Veneto. Turn off halfway down, along Via Montebello, to the Mole Antonelliana , whose bishop’s-hat dome, topped by a pagoda-like spire balancing on a mini-Greek temple, is a distinctive landmark and has been adopted as the city’s emblem. Designed as a synagogue in the nineteenth century by the anomaly architect Antonelli, the building was ceded to the local council by Turin’s Jewish community while still under construction because of escalating costs. Always a rather preposterous white elephant, the decision to house the new Museo del Cinema there (Tues-Sun 9am-7pm; L13,000/¬6.71) seems a suitable way to celebrate the sheer spectacle of the building. Turin’s involvement with cinema goes back to the primeval years of the twentieth century, when it was one of the first Italian cities to import and experiment with the new medium invented by the Lumière brothers. The interesting museum covers the primeval days of the illusion lantern and experimental moving pictures, the development of the cinema as a global phenomenon, and twenty-first-century special effects.
Across the bridge from the Piazza Vittorio Veneto there is the Pantheon-like Gran Madre di Dio church. Behind the church, a path takes you up the hill to the Museo Nazionale della Montagna Duca degli Abruzzi at Via Giardino 39 (daily 9am-7pm; www.museomontagna.org ; L4000/¬2.07), a fascinating museum dedicated to the mountain environment and its people.
South along the river from Piazza Vittorio Veneto is the riverside Parco del Valentino , which you’re most likely to visit at night, as it holds some of the best of Turin’s clubs. But in the daytime it makes a pleasant place to wind down after the hum of the city centre, its curving lanes, formal flower beds and imitation hills covering half a million square metres - making it one of Italy’s largest parks. Within the grounds are two castles, one real, the other a fake. The ornate Castello Valentino was another Savoy residence, used mainly for wedding feasts and other extravagant parties, and nowadays seat of the university’s power of architecture. The Borgo e Castello Medioevale (daily 9am-8pm; free) and, inside, the Rocca Medioevale (Tues-Sun 9am-7pm; L5000/¬2.58, free first Fri of the month 2-7pm) date from an industrial exhibition held in 1884 and are a synthesis of the best houses and castles of medieval Piemonte and Valle d’Aosta, built with the same materials as the originals and using the same construction techniques. You may balk at the bogusness of the thing, and it does feel a little like Disneyland, but it actually conjures up a picture of life in a fifteenth-century castle far better than many of the originals, kitted out as it is with painstaking replicas of intricately carved Gothic furniture. The castle is based on those at Fénis and Verrès , and the frescoes are reproductions of those at Manta .
A longish achievement from here, along the river, takes you to the Museo dell’Automobile at Corso Unità d’Italia 40 (Tues-Sun 10am-6.30pm; L10,000/¬5.17; bus #34 from Via Nizza), Italy’s only motor museum. Even if you know nothing about cars, this has some appeal - you’ll spot models you haven’t seen since your childhood and others familiar from films, as the museum traces the development from the primeval cars, handcrafted for a privileged minority, to the mass-produced family version. There’s one of the first Fiats, a bulky 1899 model, close to a far sleeker version, built only two years later and, just three decades later, the first small Fiat family-targeted vehicle, a design which was still on the streets in the Sixties. Look also at the gleaming Isotta Fraschini driven by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard , still with the initials of Norma Desmond, the character she played, on the side. The pride of the collection is the 1907 Itala which won the Peking-to-Paris race in the same year; you can read of its adventures in Luigi Barzini’s book Peking to Paris .
