Chambéry

Day 2 — Chambéry to Turin

Thursday 20 August

Breakfast at the hotel, and then the luxury of a day that doesn't start until 12:44.

So I do the walk again. Back through the park, past the fountain, down the tree-lined avenue — the same route I came in on last night, except this time I'm not looking for anything. There's a particular pleasure in walking a town you arrived in twelve hours ago and already knowing where the corners go.

Back for the bags. Then a coffee at the station, watching the board, with time to spare. Again.

The crossing

Out of Chambéry fast. Town becomes country becomes mountain in what feels like minutes, and for a long stretch there's a river out of the window running the same way we are, keeping pace, like it's chasing us.

Then the tunnel. The Fréjus — thirteen and a bit kilometres of Victorian ambition, Modane at one end and Bardonecchia at the other, and when it opened in 1871 the first of the great Alpine bores.

And when we come out the other side, my phone tells me I'm in Italy before I've even thought to open Google Maps to check. No queue, no stamp, no desk, no question asked. Just a network handover somewhere under a mountain, and a country change delivered as a notification.

Of every border on this trip, that's the one I'll remember — because it's the one where nothing happened at all.

Turin, and a taxi I hadn't planned on

Porta Susa, 15:23, and the humidity hits.

The hotel is about a mile and a half away and on a normal day I'd walk it, camera out, taking my time. Today it's too much. I take a taxi instead — and I'm glad I did. That's not a decision I'd normally make and I've decided not to feel bad about it.

First impressions through the window: Turin is an old town that has been modernised exactly where it needed to be and nowhere else. The side streets are narrow. The main roads are wide — properly wide, boulevard wide. It gives the place a strange double character, tight and grand at the same time.

The hotel receptionist speaks very good English. Two countries in, and my fears about needing the translation app remain completely unfounded.

The lie of the land

Bags down, and back out to walk — not to see anything in particular, just to work out how the city fits together. That first aimless walk is always the one that tells you the most.

Past the Egyptian Museum. Past the National Cinema Museum, which for someone who does what I do is less a landmark and more a promise for later. Then down towards the river Po, the streets opening out as they go.

I eat at Café Antonelli, a small restaurant on the big piazza near the river, and then walk slowly back to the hotel and sleep like a stone.

Conditions — humid, heavily so. Stayed dry all day, with the forecast saying it breaks in the early hours.

Tomorrow → the Musei Reali, and the monastery up the hill.