San Donato, Turin — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in San Donato?

The parish church carries the name. The Immacolata Concezione e San Donato was put up between 1883 and 1886 by the engineer Simonetta di Rivoli on a Latin cross plan, a reduced copy of Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome, and Enrico Ruffoni added the neo-Gothic front between 1900 and 1906. Turin's thinnest bell tower is nearby.

Santa Zita, built between 1866 and 1881 inside the Istituto Suore Minime di Nostra Signora del Suffragio, was designed by Francesco Faà di Bruno, and Casa Tartaglino beside it is what remains of a house he enlarged himself. Two wartime sites are open to visitors. The Sacrario del Martinetto on corso Appio Claudio was a shooting range from 1883 and became the place where more than sixty partisans and antifascists were executed in 1943 and 1944, while the air-raid shelter under piazza Risorgimento, twelve metres down, was cleaned up in 1995 and opens each year for the Liberation holiday.

Pietro Fenoglio left his best house here. Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur stands on via Principi d'Acaja at the corner of corso Francia, with Villino Raby a short way along the same corso and the Torre BBPR, the only post-rationalist building of the Milanese school in the city, rising over piazza Statuto.

What is the history of San Donato?

The old borgo was not here. It stood further east, in the ground between via della Consolata, via Garibaldi, via Giulio and corso Valdocco, walled and moated outside the Roman and medieval defences with at least two gates and a postern into the city. Soldiers and merchants lived in it.

Plague cut the numbers badly in 1630 and the wars did the rest, but the place recovered from the Renaissance on, watered by the Canale di Torino that ran the line of via San Donato and via Pacinotti. For a while it was called Martinetto. The name came from the tilt hammers the canal drove, and San Donato was only given back in 1835, after which religious landholding drew in charities like the Istituto della Sacra Famiglia and the Casa di Sanità of Casimiro Sperino.

Sweets and beer made the industrial century. Talmone-Caffarel-Prochet invented the gianduiotto in via Balbis in 1865, Pastiglie Leone kept a works on corso Regina Margherita for decades, and the breweries Bosio & Caratsch and Metzger stood on corso Principe Oddone and via San Donato until the Pedavena group bought them in 1937 and 1951.

Where is San Donato?

San Donato runs from the Dora Riparia and corso Mortara in the north down to corso Francia, bounded east by corso Principe Oddone and west by corso Potenza and corso Lecce, with Parella beyond one edge and Cit Turin beyond the other.