Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Piedmont as a destination

mels,

The national museum of the cinema in Torino is unique. It probably means the most to people who really enjoy movies and know a bit of their history, but I would even take kids there, because the various parts of the museum are set up in a highly entertaining way. It's really one big fun house. If ordinarily you wouldn't go to a movie museum, I suggest that you go to the building, the Mole Antonella, which is the symbol of the city of Torino and take the elevator to the top (unless it is raining) to see a view of the city & the Alps. Once you are inside you will have a better sense of what the museum is and whether it would amuse you to visit the rest of the museum.

I would also recommend that you go online and do some research for historic cafes/bars in Torino and historic chocolate shops (if you like coffee, cocktails and chocolate). Doing a walk that includes these shops and bars will give you a good experience of Torino's architecture.

Two of my favorite places in Torino are:

the interior of the Palazzo Madama, which is just exceptionally beautiful interior architecture (and if you have any interest in Italian ceramics, it houses an extraordinary collection on one of its upper floors, with ceramics from every part of Italy beautifully displayed) but skippable if you don't have that interest)

the quirky museum "della frutta", which houses a small collection of handmade models of fruit made for botanical research.

To really appreciate Torino you need to know 3 things while touring the city: one is that it was the original capital of "unified" Italy and a huge amount of money was poured into the city almost 2 centuries ago to showcase it as a "modern" city of knowledge, industry & European enlightenment. So things like the Egyptian museum & the fruit museum, the movie museum are part of that tradition, the city advertising itself as a place of reserach, education.

The other is to understand that Torino spurred itself to have the most advanced technology of all Italian cities: the home of Fiat, typesetting, optical equipment, watchmaking -- an almost Swiss-like industriousness. The town has trams, widnened its streets for cars and long ago the industry collapsed or went elsewhere -- but Torino still aspires (with places like Eataly) to be a generator of ideas that strenghten national pride, export & reputation.

Lastly, before it was (temporarily) the capital of modern, forward-looking, Europe-loving Italy, Torino was a royal seat, and a lot of the super fancy food and decorative elements and gorgeous palaces and gardens were designed to keep up with European royalty elsewhere. For a long time some of this tradition was despised and abandoned in favor of democratic values, but now it is being restored.

So I think if you understand a bit of what you are seeing in Torino it won't matter that you are only spending a couple of nights there. Walking around + seeing one or two museums of your choice -- there are plenty to choose from -- + some cafes and bars and good food + window shopping will teach you something about what Italy is and how it has thought about itself in modern times.