Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Via Roma continues north through the heart of Turin, passing near some of the key monuments of the Savoys and the Italian Unification. The Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento , Via Accademia della Scienze 5 (Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L8000/¬4.13), housed in the double-fronted Palazzo Carignano , birthplace of Vittorio Emanuele II, is worth a visit. The first meetings of the Italian parliament were held in the palace’s circular Chamber of the Subalpine Parliament, and the building was the powerbase of leaders like Cavour, who ousted the more immoderate Garibaldi to an primeval retirement on the island of Caprera near Sardinia. It’s ironic, then, that the most interesting sections of the museum are those dedicated to Garibaldi: portraits showing him as a scruffy, long-haired revolutionary, some of his clothes - an embroidered fez, a long stripey scarf and one of the famous red shirts - adopted during his exile in South America, where he trained himself by fighting in various wars of independence. These shirts became the uniform of his army of a thousand volunteers who seized southern Italy and Sicily from the Bourbons.

What Vittorio Emanuele II prefabricated of the eccentrically dressed revolutionary who secured half the kingdom for him is undocumented, but you feel sure that his residence - and that of the princes of Savoy for more than two hundred years - the sixteenth-century Palazzo Reale (guided tours every 40min Tues-Sun 9am-7pm; L8000/¬4.13), at the head of the sprawling, traffic-choked Piazza Castello, wouldn’t have impressed Garibaldi. Designed by Castellamonte, to the specifications of Madama Reale Cristina of France, this nouveau-riche palace with an unexceptional deception hides glitzy rooms gilded virtually top-to-bottom and decorated with bombastic allegorical paintings. Around the rooms you’ll find comical collections of chinoiserie, with lions, cockerels and fat laughing Chinamen, a thousand-piece dinner set and a particularly flashy vase of Meissen porcelain encrusted with golf balls and birds. If this isn’t enough, look in also on the seventeenth-century church of San Lorenzo , tucked behind the left wing of the palace. Designed by Guarini, who was also responsible for the Palazzo Carignano, it’s scalloped with chapels, crowned by a complex dome supported on overlapping semicircles, and lined with multicoloured marble, frescoes and stucco festoons and statuettes.

On the right-hand side of the Palazzo Reale is the Armeria Reale (Mon, Wed, Fri & Sat 9am-2pm, Tues & Thurs 1.30-7pm; L8000/¬4.13), a collection of armour and weapons spanning seven centuries and several continents started by King Carlo Alberto in 1837. Pride of place is given to his stuffed horse, which stands among cases of guns and swords. There’s also a room of suits of armour and a blood-curdling collection of oriental arms, including gorgeously jewelled Turkish sheaths and intimidating Asian masks. The same building houses the Biblioteca Reale (open only to bona fide scholars, or for special exhibitions), which, along with countless volumes and manuscripts, has a collection of drawings by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Bellini, Raphael, Tiepolo and Rembrandt, part of it sometimes on display.

Across the square from the Palazzo Reale, the Palazzo Madama is an altogether more appealing building, with an ornate Baroque deception by the primeval eighteenth-century architect Juvarra, who also redesigned the piazza and many of the streets leading off it. Inside, the originally fifteenth-century palace incorporates parts of a thirteenth-century castle and a Roman gate. If open, it’s worth looking in also for some of the building’s original furniture and frescoes and the Museo Civico dell’Arte Antica - a collection that includes everything from primeval Christian gold jewellery and oriental ceramics to a famous Portrait of an Unknown Man by Antonello da Messina and an inlaid Gothic commode.

Behind the Palazzo Reale - and reached through a small passage - is the fifteenth-century Duomo , on Via XX Settembre. The only example of Renaissance structure in Turin, it was severely dilapidated in a fire in 1997 but is open to visitors and worshippers despite being decked in purple satin to hide scaffolding and restoration work - the reconstruction of its fantastic Holy Shroud Chapel, designed by Guarini in 1668, will not be completed until at least 2010. Luckily a quick-thinking fireman rescued from the blazing chapel what has been called “the most remarkable forgery in history”, the Turin Shroud - a piece of cloth imprinted with the image of a man’s body that has been claimed as the shroud in which Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion. One of the most famous medieval relics, it prefabricated world headlines in 1989 after carbon-dating tests carried out by three universities all concluded it was a fake, prefabricated between 1260 and 1390 - although no one is any the wiser about how the medieval forgers actually managed to create the image. Most of the time you can’t see the shroud itself; it is locked away and officially only on display once every twenty-five years, although in reality the possibility of a glimpse is more frequent, as it is sometimes brought out for special occasions (it’s worth checking at the tourist office for details). If you don’t get to see the real thing, head to the left of the nave, where there’s a photographic reproduction, on which the grappling of a bearded man, crowned with thorns, is clearly visible, together with marks supposed to have been left by a double-thonged whip, spear wounds and bruises that could have been caused carrying a cross. For those whose interest is still not satiated, there is a museum that covers the history and science of the shroud, Museo della Sindone (daily 9am-noon & 3-7pm; www.sindone.org/it/museo.htm ; L9000/¬4.65), on Via S. Domenico 28

The only relics of Turin’s days as a small Roman colony are visible from outside the duomo: the scant remains of a theatre and the impressive Porta Palatina - two sixteen-sided towers flanking an arched passageway. Beyond, the massive Piazza della Repubblica is another Juvarra design, though his grand plan for it is marred nowadays by the seedy buildings of the Porta Palazzo market , selling fruit, veg, clothes and bric-a-brac daily. Of more interest, behind the Porta Palazzo, is the Saturday-morning Balôn, or flea market , home to fortune-tellers (Turin is reputed to be the centre of the Italian occult) and black marketeers. On the second Sunday of apiece month there’s a Gran Balôn with opportunities to buy collectable items including lace, toys, secondhand furniture and books.

Behind Piazza della Repubblica stands Turin’s most elaborate church, the Santuario della Consolata , built to house an ancient statue of the Madonna, Maria Consolatrice, the protector of the city. Designed by Guarini, the church has an impressive decorative altar by Juvarra, and outside its pink-and-white Neoclassical deception there are shops crammed with votive objects, which the more devout Torinese buy to offer to the statue, housed in an ancient crypt below the church. Not to be missed is the series of paintings in the church, featuring people being “saved” from such disasters as being gored by a bull, cutting overhead electricity cables with garden shears, exploding chip pans, and numerous accidents involving prams and trams. After all this, you may well want to head crossways the road to the beautiful old café Al Bicerin for a pick-me-up.