Where to Stay in Turin, Piemonte

What is Turin known for?

Turin was the first capital of united Italy and the seat of the House of Savoy. The Museo Egizio holds the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Cairo, the Mole Antonelliana carries a lift up its spire to the roof of the city, and Turin Cathedral keeps the linen that made the place a pilgrimage. Fiat built its factories here.

Vermouth, gianduiotto chocolate and the coffee counters under the arcades came out of the same court city.

What are the main landmarks in Turin?

Turin is measured by the Mole Antonelliana. The brick spire Alessandro Antonelli raised for a synagogue holds The National Cinema Museum, and a glass lift runs up the middle of it to a terrace over the Alps. Museo Egizio fills a Baroque palace nearby.

Piazza Castello holds the Royal Palace of Turin, the Royal Armoury of Turin and Palazzo Madama, while the Palatine Towers still mark the Roman gate a short way north. Turin Cathedral, beside them, guards the shroud.

What is the history of Turin?

Turin was laid out by Rome as Augusta Taurinorum, and the right-angled streets of the centre still follow that camp plan. The Palatine Towers are its gate. Emanuele Filiberto moved the Savoy capital here from Chambéry in 1563, and the dukes spent the next two centuries rebuilding a garrison town into a court, with Guarini and Juvarra given the churches, the palaces and the hunting lodges outside the walls.

A French army besieged the place in 1706, and Pietro Micca blew the tunnel and himself with it. The Risorgimento was drafted here. Cavour ran his ministry from Piemonte, the parliament sat in Palazzo Carignano, and Turin became the first capital of the Italian kingdom in 1861, holding it for four years before the government left for Florence.

The loss cost the city its reason to exist, so it built another one: Fiat opened in 1899, Lingotto rose with a test track on the roof, and half of southern Italy moved north to work the lines. The lines thinned in the end. Museums, design and the Olympic ice took over the sheds, and the Centro Storico Fiat keeps the memory of the works that paid for it.

Where is Turin?

Turin stands on the west bank of the Po in north-western Italy, where the plain runs into the Alps. Four rivers meet inside the city. The Dora Riparia comes down from the Susa Valley, the Stura di Lanzo and the Sangone join from the north and south, and all of them go into the Po below the Gran Madre di Dio.

The hills begin on the far bank and climb to Superga; westward the Alpine wall closes the horizon behind Rivoli. Beyond, the plain runs flat to Milan.

What is the climate of Turin?

Turin sits in a corner of the Po plain that the Alps close on three sides. Air stagnates there. Winter brings still, grey days and fog off the fields, cold enough for frost in the courtyards, until the föhn drops off the mountains and turns the sky glass-clear with every summit in view from Piazza Vittorio Veneto.

Summer is hot and heavy, thunder building over the hills in the late afternoon. Autumn is the clear season.

How do you get to Turin?

Turin has two main stations and a mountain behind them. Porta Nuova faces Via Roma at the end of the arcades and takes the trains to Milan and Rome, while Porta Susa handles the high-speed services and the line through the Fréjus tunnel into France. Caselle airport lies north of the city.

A metro line runs under Via Nizza from Lingotto through both stations, and the A4 and A6 autostrade leave for Milan and the Ligurian coast. The ski buses go up the Susa Valley.