Touristic and Information Packet on
Turin, Italy
A City
Redesigning its European Image..
Websites with useful and entertaining information
about Torino:
http://www.multimedia.polito.it/torino.html
http://www.extratorino.it/
(select English version)
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Turin has taken
on new roles and is no longer synonymous to only heavy industry and four
wheels. Biotechnology, ICT, aerospace and design are all new words in Turin’s
vocabulary. Not only these things, but also sports, culture and environment are
have made their way in. Innovation and the quality of life are key parts of the
new Turin. Starting over from zero to
remake its image? Not at all. The city
learned how to find the resources for renewal within its own history and roots
by rediscovering the its particular
approach to industrial development and innovation. These are things which have made Turin the
heart of Italian production since the mid 1800’s.
It is in Turin that Italian radio broadcasting,
television, the first telephone company and the cinema all started. This is a
clear sign of the presence of a tradition of widely diffused aptitude for
entrepreneurship, especially in the high tech sector.
In last
the ten years 67% of the patents in technology and telecommunications fields
granted from the European Patent Office to residents in Italy were given to companies from Turin. In the European ranking for number of
patents accepted in the telecommunications field from
1992-2001 (EPO data), Piedmont is in the twenty-first place, with 127
patents (of these, 17.5% in the wireless
technology area). The number of
publications on this subject also confirm the extremely high level of
scientific production: 281 publications between 1992 and 2001, which makes
Turin the fifteenth in Europe. Taking
into account all types of patents in 2001 Piedmont had 14% of the national
total of patents and 0.16% on the world-wide level; among the most substantial
areas are: mechanics (59% of patents), aerospace (22.9%), ICT (12.4%) and
biotech (4.7%). It is not just a
coincidence that since 2002, WIPO chose Turin as headquarters for its annual
intellectual property masters course.
The
public research centres that deserve to be mentioned are: the Galileo Ferraris
National Institute of Electronics (radio electric meteorology), the CNR
Institute of Electronics and Information and Telecommunications Engineering
(IEIIT-CNR), the Consortium for Information Systems (CSI), the Department of
Electronics and the Department of Computer Science at the Polytechnic in Turin,
the Department of Computer Science at the University of Studies, Turin.
The
private research centers include: TiLab (Telecom Italy), RAI’s Research Centre,
Vodafone Omnitel’s Research Centre and Motorola’s Research Centre. Turin
maintains a prominent role also in the manufacturing industry, with institutes
such the Fiat Research Centre, Pininfarina’s new research center, the
laboratories at Alenia at the Polytechnic University.
There
are more than 200 companies in Piedmont that work in life sciences and over 60%
them are located in Turin.
Information and communication technology is another key
sector for the Turin’s productive machine; this area figured out how to create
an industry-specific district, which is one of the things that come easiest.
Today they are the 7 thousand enterprises that of it make part, with a total
force assigned job of 54 thousand.
Between 1998 and 2002 around 50 companies chose
Turin as their headquarters, thus opening up new establishments all around the
city. A large number of these companies
are foreign. This is a result of the intense activity of the ITP Agency –
Investimenti a Torino e in Piemonte)
the opportunity for development in the capital of Piedmont. Only 20% of
the new companies are Italian, 28% French, 22% American, 12% German, and 7%
from the UK. Other companies come from
varied countries such as Sweden, Austria and China.
The dedication to education in Turin is reflected
by the presence of a large United Nations school for staff experts. Since 1998, the world-wide Organization for
Work (OIL) has had its training center right on the banks of the Po; every year
young officials and managers come to Turin to follow these prestigious courses.
Motorola’s
dedication to the technology center that was added to Turin in 1998. It is the
biggest of the various centers that are scattered around Europe.
In 2001 a pact formed between Turin's
local government and companies, establishing the following goals for the ICT
field: to double the number of researchers and ensure the start of fifty new
companies by 2012.
Mirror of a diversified and competitive economy
whose strengths are in research and technology. As the capital city of one of
Europe's most economically vibrant Regions, Turin boasts a productive system
that has an extremely strong relationship with the world market.
Characterised by a highly technical content and
technological innovation, the Turin industrial companies operate in many
various areas: car manifacturing, robotics and industrial automation, design,
textiles, agroindustrial, banking and insurance, information technologies and
telecommunications, publishing and printing. The industrial fabric of the city
is not only made up of mechanical engeneering giants, but also includes a vast
range of small and medium-sized firms producing a variety of goods for the home
market and for export.
Set at the geographical and economic crossroad of
two strategically significant continental axes, Turin now possesses the air,
rail and road links needed to place it at the heart of Europe. Today, the city
not only wants to be an "old industrial town", but, above all, wants
to concentrate its innovative powers on the advanced services sector, on global
networks and on highly technological research and development: infact, about
20% of the total Italian business expenditure in these sector is located in the
Turin area
The current watchword is therefore
"productive diversification", also made possible by a continuing
development of research activities in the various sectors. It is an effort that
involves a large number of very diverse institutions in both the public and the
private sectors, of medium and large dimensions: from Cselt to the FIAT
Research Centre, from the RAI Research Centre to the Istituto Galileo Ferraris,
the University and the Polytechnic.
In particular, in the motor car industry, besides
the Fiat Group- Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino, founded by Giovanni
Agnelli in 1899, the most important industrial group in Italy - Turin hosts a
number of companies operating in the components and car design sectors like
SKF, Dayco, Bertone, Italdesign-Giugiaro and Pininfarina.
The city has also an important presence in the
agroindustrial area: the Lavazza, an international leader in the coffee sector,
is from Turin, a reality that perfectly combines technological development and
production with tradition. Today Lavazza Ltd., who employs over 1,600 people,
boasts 45% of the Italian market and exports nearly 30% of its annual output,
with sales revenues of some billion 1,200 lire.
The city and the surrounding area is home to some
of the best known producers of sparkling wines and spirits, such as Cinzano,
Martini & Rossi, Gancia or the confectionery industry with firms like
Ferrero, Caffarel and Peyrano. Their high quality products and professional
expertise help to mantain the prestige of the Turin tradition.
The textile industry, identified on a regional
scale by companies that produce world-renowned yarns and fabrics of superlative
quality, is represented in Turin by the GFT group, manifacturer of, among
other, such famous names as Valentino, Cerruti and Ungaro. Set up in 1930 by
the Rivetti and Levy families, GFT has become, in over 60 years, a huge
industrial empire that in 1996 employed 6,000 people, over 3,300 in Italy,
working in 14 factories around the world, and has sales revenues of 1,650
billion lire, and produced 15 million garments.
Also in the banking and insurance sectors there is
a very strong presence: the Istituto Bancario San Paolo has its headquarters in
Turin that, with over 22,000 employees, 1,200 branches and 1,400 cash points,
is the most important bank in Italy. It is a position the bank has achieved
after more than 430 years of service to the growth of the nation's economy,
participating in the reconstruction of the Nation after World War II,
supporting the economic boom of the Sixties, and contributing to the national
and international growth of the market and Italian companies. Also operating in
he Piedmontese capital, since 1827, is the CRT Bank, the second largest savings
bank in Italy, that has 380 branches spread over eight regions: a bank built
for the people, mindful to the needs of the small saver and families.
To compete the picture, the most important
co-operative bank in Europe, the Banca Popolare di Novara , and three of the
nation's oldest established insurance companies, Sai, Toro and Reale Mutua
Assicurazioni, are all based in Turin. SAI, Italy's third largest insurance
group with over 3.8 million clients, and 1,580 billion lire of net capital of
the Parent Company alone, has been in the insurance business for over 70 years.
Toro Assicurazioni, with over 160 years of
history, was founded in 1833 by some of the Royal Decree of King Carlo Alberto.
It is the sixth largest insurance group in Italy for the amount of sales
revenues, and one of the first as regards its economic results (over 1,700
billion lire of premiums in 1966) and financial soundness.
Reale Mutua was founded in 1828 and is currently
the nation's biggest mutual insurance company with over 1 million clients
insured and more than 2 million policies, and has a significant presence in the
international market (Spain and France).
Turin is equally well represented in more
innovative fields like information technologies and telecommunications. Turin
is indeed an important centre, being home to the headquarters of Stet-Telecom
Italia, the sixth largest telecommunications company in the world.
The city is also authoritatively represented in a
wide variety of other sectors like Einaudi, Utet, Sei, Allemandi and Bollati
Boringhieri (publishing), Armando Testa and BGS (advertising), Robe di Kappa,
Superga, Invicta (sportswear), De Fonseca (footwear) and Borbonese (leather
goods and clothes accessories).
Turin today is
a dynamic reality engaged in a modernization process unrivalled in Italy: A
place where economic growth is matched by urban redevelopment and revitalized
image.
From the city of motor car to a center of advanced
technology and integrated productive systems, following an original
redevelopment project. Although it is internationally renowned as an industrial
city and a capital of the motor car this, for Turin, is now a stereotype, an
incomplete picture. Today, its image is different, more diverse: the city is
oriented towards the new high-tech Europe, that of advanced research.
Turin has
changed, and is still changing, taking on a new economical and productive
appearance based upon a modern culture of innovation. Today, Piedmont, and in
particular its capital, possess all the technical and scientific capabilities
and the leading edge know-how needed to become a centre of technological
excellence. In concert with he productive evolution, Turin is today a dynamic
reality committed to an integrated modernization process, unique in Italy: its
economic development corresponds to its urban renewal. A vast series of
projects have been planned and put into action, with the aim of integrating the
city's rich historical heritage, which has never really been appreciated or
publicized, with the renewed needs of more modern and efficient system of
public services.
Easily accessed from outside, the Turin territory
is currently putting into action new large urban projects: renewal of the
infrastructure and new construction works; redevelopment of the city's
historical centre; revitalization of the suburbs; doubling of the green belt
and improvement of the city's attractive waterways.
In particular, four projects are worthy examples: the
former Lingotto car factory has been converted to a complex with modern
services, cultural venues and a hotel; the old steel and iron industrial area
is being transformed into Europe's first environmental technological park
(Environment Park) occupying an area of 100 hectars: the Turin Polytechnic is
being doubled in size to cover 13 hectares, and has benefited from a major
injection of funds into its research and training activities; finally, the
cityìs railway system is being redeveloped and improved with important
"passante" (railway link) works (three lines of 15 km placed
underground), thus making a radical transformation in the system for the access
into the city, and the mobility around it.
Recognising the central role of telecommunications
in modern economic development, Turin is becoming Italy's first fully
"cabled" city. Work on the city's ISDN network (Integrated Services
Digital Network) began in 1994, and today a complete fiber optic communication
network is available to its companies, institutions, business, public service
departments and private citizens. This is the new image of Turin and its
region, both with their sights set firmly on the competitive Europe of the
future, with a multidisciplinary approach and integrated productive system.
I'm always surprised when first-time or
infrequent visitors to Italy tell me that they plan to spend a few days in
Milan. Their idea, I think, is that Milan will offer the epitome of style,
which along with art and food is one of the three pillars of Italian culture.
This reminds me of the 1946 George Price cartoon of an aging flapper racing
toward a news vendor and crying, "Vogue! And hurry!" True,
Milan is the center of the country's fashion and media industries. But that
doesn't mean the visitor can plug into them simply by walking down the streets
or going into the right bars. Trendsetters generally keep behind closed doors,
and the customers in the famed boutiques of Via Monte Napoleone are seldom
Italian. Gray, vast, and monolithic, Milan is a city very hard to like -- and
nearly impossible to love.
Those hankering for northern elegance should know that Turin is no more than an
hour and a half from both Milan's city center and its airport, Malpensa, which
was recently designated one of Italy's principal international gateways
(despite the fact that connections to and from Milan remain inconvenient).
Every street in Turin offers at least one stylish shop and an unexpected
Baroque or Art Nouveau vista; the museums are excellent and varied; shops, thanks
to industrial money, have been able to maintain their ornate
turn-of-the-century façades and interiors; the cafés are the most spectacular
in a country blessed with a café on every block; the wine and cheese, from the
surrounding hills and mountains of Piedmont, are among Italy's best (and often
unavailable beyond the region's borders); and the pastry and chocolates are
easily the country's most refined. Price's panicky flapper might not find the
very latest frock. But in the luxurious, tasteful shops of Turin she would find
clothes that designers actually wear.
I go to Turin as often as possible, and can't
imagine tiring of it. Like Naples, my other favorite Italian city, Turin has
lately been making itself dramatically more accessible, inviting, and navigable
for tourists. The periodic viewings of the Shroud both jam the city (the
two-month-long showing last spring, the first in twenty years, drew more than a
million people) and set deadlines for renovation. The Royal Palace was
repainted and cars were banned from much of the main piazza in time for last
spring's onslaught, and the showing next year, in honor of the millennial, is
likely to bring more renovation.
Yet even as it spruces up, Turin retains the intimacy and bustle of a pre-war
city. On recent visits, when I would find that some Italian magazine had just
highlighted the many improvements and called for yet more, I encountered very
few tourists but many friendly natives. Turin has long been an insiders'
secret. That may soon change.
WHEN people think of Turin, they usually
think of cars: the t in the acronym "Fiat" is for
"Torino." The Agnelli family, which controls the company, is Italy's
modern-day royalty: Fiat owns the local newspaper and has a controlling
interest in Corriere della Sera, the leading national daily; the family
owns Juventus, a soccer team that is something of a national religion. Fiat's
huge postwar expansion and its housing of southern-Italian emigrants in
faceless suburbs enlarged the city, which in the seventies had to cope with the
effects of helter-skelter growth and North-South culture clashes.
Turin is no Motor City, though. Fiat's presence is all but invisible in the
center. Not even the Museum of the Automobile, one of the world's great
collections of antique cars, housed in a big, airy 1960 International Style
building facing the Po, is run by Fiat. Instead -- and this is perhaps the
greatest surprise to the visitor -- the architecture of the city center is
Baroque, and the prevailing feeling is not of heavy industry but of
intellectual aristocracy. "I can't get over what a beautiful city this
is," I heard again and again when I recently led colleagues on an informal
tour.
Blood royalty, rather than industrial royalty, built the city. Turin was the
seat of the House
of Savoy, whose kings reigned, at least nominally, until 1946. One of them,
the reform-minded Carlo Alberto, helped to stoke the revolutionary fervor that
led to Italy's unification, in 1861, with Turin as the capital. (The capital
was moved to Florence in 1865 and to Rome five years later.) The first Italian
Parliament met in Turin's most beautiful building -- the Palazzo Carignano, built in the late seventeenth century and
the birthplace of Carlo Alberto.
Sightseeing should begin at the palazzo, which is within steps of the city's
main museums and just blocks away from the best shops and nicest cafés. The
palazzo is a Baroque marvel of undulating lines and red-brick ornament,
including, unexpectedly, motifs taken from Native American feather headdresses
(to commemorate Piedmontese participation in a French victory over the tribes
of Quebec). Today it houses an absorbing museum of the unification of Italy --
helpfully, many of the placards are in English -- with excellent summaries of
the country's wartime history. History comes alive across the way at the
Ristorante del Cambio, an elaborately decorated restaurant where Count Camillo
di Cavour, the architect of unification, held court and kept an eye on who was
going in and out of Parliament. Perhaps he ate bollito misto, fragrant boiled
meats sliced on a rolling silver cart, which is still the house specialty.
Once your eye is accustomed to seeing humble brick as a sinuous medium, you
will note the similarly bold building catercorner from the palazzo, which
houses Turin's two must-see museums -- the Egyptian Museum and the Galleria
Sabauda. The Sabauda boasts canvases by Italian and Flemish masters, including
Fra Angelico, Mantegna, Bellini, and Van Eyck. Aside from the Shroud, the
Egyptian Museum is Turin's chief tourist draw: any native will tell you, with
somewhat hyperbolic enthusiasm, that after Cairo, Turin has the finest Egyptian
collection in existence. Fascinating and rare as the painted sarcophagi and
mummies and little kitchen tools may be, however, both labels and lighting are
sparse except in one freshly installed basement gallery. (A plan under
discussion would expand the Egyptian Museum into the space now occupied by the
picture gallery upstairs; the paintings would move to the Royal Palace once its
own restoration is completed.)
A walk in any direction from the Palazzo Carignano will reveal tree-lined
avenues and boulevards, tranquil Baroque squares, arcaded streets (Turin has
eleven miles of arcades), and Art Nouveau buildings that seem, like much of the
city, to be more French than Italian: Piedmont was a French département for
more than a decade under Napoleon. You might happen onto an eccentric museum,
such as the Marionette Museum, or the long-shuttered Museum of Cinema -- Turin
was as important to the birth of Italian filmmaking as to the Italian
automobile industry. The film museum is scheduled to re-open by the end of the
year, in the very tall, very ugly Mole Antonelliana.
Or you can keep your eye on shops: shops specializing in such old-fashioned
items as fountain pens, metal and rubber stamps, tea by way of Paris (two
sisters have opened an enchanting new boutique at Via della Rocca, 2), jewelry
from the twenties through the seventies (Lorenzo and Paola Monticone run an
extremely chic little shop at Via della Rocca, 4), Art Nouveau antiques (the
sumptuous and very expensive Tina Biazzi gallery, at Via Maria Vittoria, 19),
and British and British-influenced men's clothes (Jack Emerson, a big
warehouselike shop where old-money Turin goes to watch its pennies, on the
second floor of a modern building across from the Cambio restaurant). Each
Saturday is the Balôn, a large flea market near the city's marvelous
cast-iron-and-glass food markets; on the second Sunday of every month an
expanded version, the Gran Balôn, draws dealers and customers from all over the
region.
Piazza San Carlo, a few blocks from the Palazzo Carignano, is usually called
the drawing room of Turin, since so many Turinese pass through it several times
a day. I like looking at the 1940s façade of the Lux Cinema, in a shopping
gallery off the piazza, and I always stop at the Libreria Druetto, my favorite
of the city's many bookstores, which has a good selection of guides and art
books and a generous English-language section. Like many shops in Turin, it
feels like a club. I was made a member on my first visit, when Elisabeth zu
Stolberg, the tall, blonde, professorial co-owner, tested my rusty German on
learning my surname. Each time I greet her, she makes me stumble through a few
German pleasantries before she suggests which new books might be of interest.
A city stroll might continue down Via Roma, the arcaded main street for
shopping and promenading, which was rebuilt by the Fascists in the 1930s, to
Piazza Castello, the historic heart of Turin. At its center is the Palazzo
Madama, a stark medieval castle on one side (hence the piazza's name) and a
Baroque glass-fronted palace on the other. The piazza provides an introduction
to the work of the two Turinese architects to watch for: Guarino Guarini, the
designer of the Palazzo Carignano, and Filippo Juvarra, the designer of the
windowed façade of the Palazzo Madama. Of the two, Guarini, a mathematician who
flourished in the mid-1600s, was the more flamboyantly original: his work keeps
the viewer off balance, wondering where light is entering and whether a dome could
possibly be as tall as it seems. The plain Baroque façade of the San Lorenzo
church, at one side of the vast piazza, gives no hint of Guarini's startling
octagonal interior and dome behind it. Juvarra, who assumed the reins as royal
architect fifty years later, took a more classical, monumental approach.
The contrast between the two architects is probably best shown by Guarini's
surpassingly strange vertiginous, black-marble-lined Chapel of the Shroud, in
the cathedral behind the piazza. You can't be disoriented by the chapel for a
while: it burned two years ago in a fire that left the Shroud undamaged.
Theoretically the chapel will reopen in time for next year's showing; the
dates, and much else, should be available on the Turin tourist bureau's Web site,
at www.turismotorino.org.
MY passion for Turin may be largely
explained by the constant opportunities to drink first-rate coffee (Italy's
largest coffee roaster, Lavazza, is headquartered in the city) accompanied by
first-rate sandwiches, pastry, and chocolate. Turin's most gorgeous cafés hide
behind the arcades of Piazza Castello. Baratti & Milano joins two distinct
architectural styles, somewhat like the Palazzo Madama; one is frothy Parisian
Art Nouveau, and the other is the severe and fine-patterned Art Nouveau common
in Jugendstil Vienna. Along the same arcade is the perfectly preserved Caffè
Mulassano, with a small, cube-shaped interior from the early 1900s whose every
surface is ornamented with colored marble or carved wood.
Turin's most charming café is Al Bicerin, a ten-minute walk from Piazza
Castello and an essential stop for its definitive version of the eponymous
drink, a mixture of chocolate, espresso, and creamy, very lightly foamed milk
served in a low glass. The café has been in the hands of women since it opened,
in the late eighteenth century (its simple, honey-colored wood interior dates
back to the 1830s), and for many years was one of the few places women could
appear alone in public; here they dunked long, wide ladyfingers into a bicerin
to break the fast after mass at the Church of the Consolata, across the
way. The cookies are still excellent. Today the café has become a hangout for
the city's youth, who crowd out the door on Sunday afternoons.
The chicest café, appropriately, is on Via Roma: Zucca, whose interior is plain
by comparison with Turin's Art Nouveau jewels but whose clientele more than
makes up for it. The crowd is especially dense and well dressed at the aperitif
hour, from roughly 6:30 to 8:30. Turinese cafés offer plate upon plate of
savory tidbits with aperitifs, and the sandwiches at Zucca are the best in a
city known for elegant sandwiches: don't miss the split focaccia slathered with
fresh cream cheese and white-truffle paste. But then, I think everything is
better at Zucca.
Many of the city's superb food shops have wood-and-etched-glass façades that
look utterly Parisian, such as Steffanone, a premier gourmet shop, just off
Piazza San Carlo; Paissa, which seems right out of the past century and sells
wine and dry goods at branches in Piazza San Carlo and Piazza Vittorio Veneto;
and the beautiful cheese, pasta, and grissini (breadsticks, a city specialty)
shops along Via San Tommaso, around the corner from the frescoed Art Nouveau
arcades of Via Pietro Micca. The souvenir to bring home is a bag of
gianduiotti, little ingots of chocolate and hazelnuts, which should be strong,
not too sweet, and slightly gritty. The classic place to buy gianduiotti is
Peyrano, long the city's reigning chocolatier, which roasts its own cocoa beans
over olive wood; lately Peyrano has been getting some stiff competition from
the artisan Guido Gobino, who roasts the famous local hazelnuts especially dark
before grinding them into a paste. Pastry shops of note include Ghigo, in the
arcaded Via Po, which bakes the city's best-loved panettone; I always take home
a cellophane-wrapped package of soft, buttery ladyfingers (and often some
homemade gianduiotti, too) from the Gertosio on Via Lagrange, the street that
is considered Turin's gourmet row.
The choice of full-fledged restaurants isn't nearly as interesting or tempting
as the choice of cafés, perhaps because people snack so frequently or perhaps
because Turinese prefer to eat dinner at home. Piedmont is legendary for its
rich and endless meals. Mercifully, few restaurants in Turin serve
old-fashioned Piedmont haute cuisine: for that you must venture into the
countryside, or go to nearby Alba, the truffle capital. I frequent the Montecarlo,
a handsome, brightly lit, clubby place whose owner, Sante Prevarin, will devise
a menu of typical but not excessive dishes, best built around the impeccable
fish. Any meal should begin with tiny meat- or spinach-filled agnolotti made of
fantastically delicate (because yolk-rich) pasta rolled by hand. Prevarin will
bring out a selection of cheeses he claims are impossible to find elsewhere
(ask for the herb-coated Maccagno, which he says "puts the hills into your
mouth"), and for dessert there are addictive raisin- and pinenut-studded
cookies rolled in, of all things, corn flakes.
Turin's hotels are functional, as befits a businesslike city, but several have
something approaching charm. The Turin Palace,
across from the Moorish train station, was once the luxurious empress of the
city's hotels. It now has a 1960s feel despite its century-long history, and is
still known for its service and well-heeled guests. I rely on the plush, snug Sitea, a
central four-star businessman's hotel where the Juventus team stays, drawing
crowds to cheer the athletes as they board big buses for matches. Nearby is the
three-star Victoria, a charming small hotel set back from the street; friends
have been very happy there, and also at the three-star Boston
(whose location, in an elegant residential neighborhood behind the train
station, is relatively inconvenient). I was impressed by a quick tour of the
three-star Roma,
in the piazza just across from the station. The rooms are large and, thanks to
double-glazed windows, quiet, and the prices are very reasonable.
EVEN if you don't rent a car to explore the Piedmont in search of
white truffles and Barolo, I recommend two minor excursions to see two Savoy
residences; each is just a twenty- or thirty-minute taxi ride from the center.
Castello di Rivoli is a severe, dramatically sited eighteenth-century brick
castle in grand, sober Baroque, designed by Juvarra and renovated from 1979 to
1984 to house a decent collection of contemporary art. It's worth going for the
ingeniously rebuilt interior and the commanding view of the city. Stupinigi is
a sort of dream: a hunting lodge built not long after Versailles, on a much
smaller scale but nonetheless grand. In the unique plan devised by Juvarra,
diagonal arms radiate outward from a spectacular central ballroom, whose
painted walls, huge glass chandelier, and gilded crossbeams have been perfectly
restored. But the royal suites around the ballroom have mostly not. You can thus see
furniture and wall fabrics as they were, and they are all the more riveting for
being slightly in tatters. The sometimes threadbare but always sumptuous rooms
reminded me of Deborah Turbeville's desolate, disturbing pictures of
Versailles. Here you can imagine aristocratic eighteenth-century life, private
and public, being conducted, and even imagine yourself part of it. Though Turin
is nearly as firmly planted in the present as Milan, every aspect of it is
tinged by the past. Perhaps that is what makes it uniquely civilized.
by
Corby
Kummer
The Mole Antonelliana, a
historic building that marks Turin’s cityscape
Also home of the Cinema
Museum
©2003, Laura Alessi
Sestriere,
just outside Torino in the Italian Alps:
location of next winter Olympics
©2003, Laura Alessi
The Politecnico di Torino
Night
falls on Turin
©2003 Città di Torino, Fototeca Wed del Comune di Torino
Castello del Valentino
©2003 Città di
Torino, Fototeca Wed del Comune di Torino
Piazza Castello
©2003 Città di Torino, Fototeca Wed del Comune di Torino
TORINO AT A GLANCE
The City
Although it is
internationally renowned as an industrial city and is easily associated with
the automotive industry, this
is an incomplete picture of the city Turin has become in the
recent years. Today, Turin’s
image is that of a city oriented towards the new high-tech
Europe, that of advanced
research.
The dedication to education
in Turin is reflected by the ever increasing number of
students who come here to
study not only from all over Italy, but also internationally. In
addition, there has been
recent addition of new schools, training centers, and programs
such as the large United
Nations school for staff experts. Since 1998, the world-wide
Organization for Work (OIL)
has had its training center right on the banks of the Po
River; every year young
officials and managers come to Turin to follow these prestigious
courses. Another noteworthy
program is the annual Post-Graduate Specialization
Course on Intellectual
Property, which is organized jointly by the University of Turin
and the World Intellectual
Property Organization’s Worldwide Academy.
The technological portfolio
of the city is extremely diversified, but Turin is on the
leading edge of the
automotive and telecommunication industry. The two major
corporate research
laboratories, the FIAT Research Centre and Telcom Italia’s TiLAB
are located here. In the last
decade, 67% of the patents in technology and
telecommunications fields
granted from the European Patent Office to residents in Italy
were given to companies from
Turin. Another interesting fact is that in the past five
years, around 50 companies
chose Turin as their headquarters, among which 80% are
foreign. In 2001 a pact
formed between Turin's local government and companies,
establishing the following
goals for the ICT field: to double the number of researchers
and ensure the start of fifty
new companies by 2012.
Turin is city a that can be compared
to a mosaic – it is made up of many different pieces,
each of which add something
special to the spirit and culture of the city. Now that we
have explored the
intellectual component which drives the city, it is also necessary to
spend a little time
mentioning some of the other things that make Turin the great city it
is. Food is one of the
highlights of Turin’s culture, and is known not only for its special
truffles and meat, but also
for its extraordinary chocolates and wines.
There are 46 museums in
Turin: from the Egyptian Museum, which is the second most
important after the one in
Cairo, to the National Museum of Cinema, located inside the
Mole Antonelliana, the symbol
monument of the city. Few people know that the
Biblioteca Reale has Leonardo
da Vinci’s self-portrait - one of the most famous drawings
in the world. In order to
best enjoy all these treasures, the city of Turin has created a
special museum card which
allows people to visit more than 120 collections in Turin and
in the region, paying one
small fee for this special two day pass.
Transportation
Turin is easy to reach by
plane, car and train. There are two international airports, both
of which are reachable in
less than an hour from the city center. The Sandro Pertini
Airport, is just ten miles
outside the city, and Malpensa is about 60 miles away. There
are hourly buses which run
from both airports to the city center daily. For those arriving
by train, Turin is very well
serviced through national and international high-speed trains.
The Italian highways -
especially those in northern Italy - are among the most developed
and well kept in Europe, thus
providing for safe and fluid driving conditions. Turin is
very well connected to all
Italian cities and also to the French, Austrian and Swiss
highways. Turin offers a very
efficient public transportation network. A subway system is
currently being constructed
and the first line will be opened in 2004.
Conference
Facilities
Turin offers an impressive
variety of conference venues. After thoroughly weighing the
options, we selected the
Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, as it is most central and just the
right size and environment
for such an event ( See Program Facility for full description).
Other conference centers
available in Turin include: Lingotto, Torino Incontra, the
Unione Industriale and the
Politecnico’s Aula Magna. The Lingotto Conference Center:
a large modern structure with
13 halls, having a seat capacity varying from 2,090 to 30
seats. The Torino Incontra
Conference Center: carved out of the carefully remodeled
interior of the Chamber of
Commerce building in the city center. It consists of five main
halls (seating 47, 57, 99,
161 and 341 people) and a multipurpose area of about 1300
sqm column-free space where
it is possible to seat up to 880 persons. The Unione
Industriale Conference
Center: a venue with 4 conference rooms with capacity from 80
to 432 seats and a very large
garden which can be used as catering area. Politecnico of
Torino: it offers a large
Aula Magna with 600 seats and many other classrooms with
capacity from 200 to 30
seats.
Hotel
accommodation
The following are presently
available in Turin: 1,973 rooms in 4-star hotels, 3,695 in 3-
star hotels, 555 in 2-star
hotels and 800 in 1-star hotels. The hotel capacity is being
increased by 2000-2500 rooms
to accommodate the guests for the 2006 Olympic Games.
Gala venue
What better way to share the
treasures from Turin’s past with visitors than having a great
meal in one of it’s
beautifully kept historical buildings? Since Turin has such a rich
history ( it was, in fact,
the first capital of Italy), there are a great number of possibilities
for the gala dinner. One
option is the Palazzo Carignano, which is where the first Italian
Parliament was held. There
are also several royal residences both in Turin and just
outside the city limits that
represent an extraordinary heritage left by the Savoy Royal
Family. It is also possible
to organize the dinner in one of the old royal palaces, such as
the Stupinigi Hunting Lodge,
just 10 km from the city center.