Turin a city of surprises, not just Fiat

Say Turin and most people think of Fiat and Juventus. The Olympic host city, however, is far more than car factories and a soccer club.

Jane Barrett has more...

When thousands of visitors descend on Turin for the Winter Games in February, they will be tumbled around in a city of surprises and seeming contradictions.

While the outskirts house car plants and ugly post-war apartment blocks, central Turin sports some of Italy's finest baroque architecture and elegant porticoed avenues.

Turin was once the proud centre of the Savoy Kingdom and Italy's first capital city but it has since been dragged into the doldrums by Fiat's financial crises.

While the city is home to the Turin shroud, one of Christianity's most famed relics, it is also considered to be the centre of black magic and satanism in Italy.

"We've always been stereotyped by the rest of Italy but what do we care? We just get on with it up here. We're a pretty insular lot," said Giuseppe Mariotti, a taxi driver.

Tucked in the northwest corner of Italy, Turin is almost as close to Paris as it is to Rome and the Torinese accent has distinctive overtones of French with its guttural "r".

This is still most definitely Italy, however, and boasts some of the best that the country has to offer - with a twist.

Most tourists expect to find Italy stuffed with Roman ruins, imposing churches and Renaissance art.

Instead, Turin's ancients come in the form of a huge Egyptian museum, its trademark towering spire is not a church but a former synagogue-turned-cinema museum and its art scene is decidedly contemporary rather than classical.

The city boasts numerous modern art galleries, feeding off the "arte povera" movement that rose up in Turin in the 1960s.

Modern art

It continues to incubate modern art. For example at Christmas, rather than put up the usual twinkly lights, Turin commissions contemporary artists to create futuristic light installations around the city.

Walk Turin's grid of streets and you find dozens of young designers have set up shop, selling anything from modern picture frames to outlandish fashion to funky lamps and sofas.

"People think of Milan as the design centre of Italy but actually there's so much more going on here. There are fewer rules and big names, more freedom to do what you want," said art student Raffaella Musso.

The artistic vein has made the fortune of Turin's famed car designers Giugiaro and Pininfarina, who designed the torch that is carrying the Olympic flame to the Winter Games. Creativity has also taken over homely areas such as cooking.

The Piemonte region is known for high-class foods such as white truffles and rich red wines but a new breed of bars and restaurants has bubbled up in the backstreets of Turin.

Wine bars in the cobbled Quadrilatero Romano offer more than the typical plate of salami and cheese, pairing Italy's best wines perfectly with surprising concoctions such as marzipan and fruit or gorgonzola and jam.

Vegetarian restaurants and modern cuisine, rarities in much of Italy, are par for the course for young Turin restaurateurs.

Then again, tradition is still much loved and throughout the day, wood-panelled bars like the famous "Baratti" are full of locals sipping the thick hot chocolate the city is known for.

The counterpoint of ancient and modern makes for a lively city but Turin still struggles to loose itself from the past.

If the city is now home to less than a million people and geographically isolated from much of Italy, its central role in the country's history is clear.

Turin was the starting point for the push to unify Italy in the 19th century, a movement called "il Risorgimento" (The Resurgence) after a Turin newspaper.

The city continued to wield political clout when the capital moved to Rome, thanks to its industry which powered Italy's economy into the Group of Seven richest nations.

The boom was due in large part to Fiat, which made armoury during World War Two and then pumped out cars cheap enough for most families to buy, fuelling spending, the economy and the power of the company's founding Agnelli family.

Fiat has since fallen from grace and deep into loss, cutting many of the jobs that kept Turin going and casting a cloud of depression over the older blue-collar generation.

So Turin wants the Olympic spotlight to shine on the new face of the city, the young and trendy rather than the political and industrial, hopefully luring in new investment and tourists.

"Turin isn't just Fiat," said Mayor Sergio Chiamparino. "Far from that.

"People will see that when they arrive and get under the skin of the city. We just hope they'll keep coming back."