Turin

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, 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.

Musei Reali

The tour starts before you’ve really begun it. You come in and there’s an enormous marble staircase, already telling you what kind of place you’ve walked into.

Then the rooms. Lavish doesn’t quite cover it — paintings on every wall, and then you look up and they’re across the ceilings too, so you spend a good part of the visit walking around with your head tilted back.

Then the long hall. Armour, for men and for horses, and weapons ranked away from you down the length of the room. After all that gilt and silk it’s a completely different kind of craftsmanship, and every bit as obsessive.

More paintings after that, old and new. And then the chapel that holds the Shroud. I’d built a picture of it in my head on the way round, and it was wrong — it’s far darker than I’d imagined. Sombre, almost severe, after everything that came before it.

Out into the grounds, and it’s wet. Properly wet. The rain had stopped more or less as I stepped outside, but big puddles stayed in the gravel long after I’d gone. It looked wonderful anyway — fountains running, the grass an absurd green, everything holding the light the way things only do just after rain.

It was almost empty when I arrived and filled up steadily the whole time I was there. Go early.

Lunch, with no notes

The sun came back and the streets dried in what felt like minutes. The humidity stayed behind for hours after everything else had moved on.

I take the smaller roads after that, no particular route, and end up outside Zia Esterina Sorbillo — a Naples name, in Turin, two days before I’m due in Naples. I decide to take that as a sign. A drink, a pizza, a table outside, and a while spent watching people go past.

Three hours inside the Mole

No tickets left for the lift up to the roof, which stings for about a minute — until I get inside and realise I’m going to lose most of the afternoon in here anyway.

The special exhibition is My Name Is Orson Welles, and it’s built up the spiral ramp inside the Mole, so you climb through his career rather than walk past it. Four hundred-odd pieces: drawings, documents, posters, things pulled out of the museum’s own Welles archive. Three enormous screens hanging eighteen metres above your head, running the hall-of-mirrors sequence from The Lady from Shanghai. A room lined with frames from F for Fake.

Nearly three hours, in the end. For someone who does this for a living, it’s less a museum visit than a very good education handed over for the price of a ticket.

Up to the Cappuccini

Then out, and up.

The climb to Santa Maria al Monte dei Cappuccini, and a view back across the whole of Turin that I was not remotely ready for. The city flat below, the river cutting through it, the Alps standing behind the lot of it.

I genuinely don’t understand why more people don’t come up here. I had it almost to myself.

Looking back on it

Dinner at Pasión Con Alma Y Fuego — a Buenos Aires blonde beer and a fillet steak, which after a day of walking and climbing felt entirely earned.

Then a quiet walk back, to get ready for my last day in Turin.

Conditions — thunderstorm before dawn, heavy rain until mid-morning, then sun. The streets dried in minutes. The humidity did not.

Museo Egizio

I start with a coffee near the Egyptian Museum, and then spend the whole morning inside it. Turin has the sort of Egyptian collection a capital city would build a wing of its tourist board around, and here it simply sits, a few streets from where I had breakfast.

Shops, and the great toilet problem

Out afterwards into the shopping district, through Piazza San Carlo, and back around into the park at the Musei Reali — partly for the shade, mostly because by then I was hunting for a public toilet and could not find one anywhere. Turin will give you arcades, palaces and four hundred cafés. It will not give you that. Plan accordingly.

Lunch under the arcades

Late lunch in a restaurant tucked into one of the arcades. And then, honestly, nothing. Walking. Looking at the buildings, looking at the people, letting a last day in a city do what last days in a city are for.

Porta Nuova

Porta Nuova is far more modern inside than the front of it lets on, and the entire upper floor is a food court. I ate fast food. I’m not going to defend it. I had hours to kill and a rucksack I didn’t want to put down twice.

So I sat up there and watched videos on my phone while the light went, which is a strange way to spend your last hours in a city you’ve liked — but that’s what the gap before a night train is. Dead time, and you take it as it comes.

The sleeper

Every carriage is numbered on the outside, so finding mine was no trouble at all. Getting down the corridor to my compartment with the rucksack still on my back was another matter entirely.

The compartment was ready for me. One bed already made up, and a second set of sheets and pillowcases in a bag, freshly laundered, waiting to be made up if I wanted it. A breakfast menu sitting on the little desk, printed in Italian and English.

We left exactly when we were supposed to.

And then the part nobody prepares you for: lying there, fully horizontal, somewhere north of the whole rest of the country, trying to talk yourself into sleeping.

Conditions — hot, but the humidity gone. Dry all day.