Torino
Before we got to Alba and the Langhe, the paradise of grapevines, we were in Torino (Turin) for three nights and the Townhouse 70 was a great place to stay. It is around the corner from the Piazza Castello, the site of at least a dozen major historic structures. There is the Palazzo Madama. There is Baratti e Milano with it's silky gelato and hazelnut chocolates and old-world, gold and crystal, Nineteenth-Century elegance. There is the Shroud of Turin, at the far end of the Piazza, if you are interested in such things, but it is kept in a fifteen-feet long, leaden, ceremonial box behind bullet-proof glass. There is the Teatro Reggio, the opera house, steps away from the Piazza and adjacent to the Royal Palace and the Royal Library which houses important Leonardo da Vinci drawings.
We did not visit the opera, their season has not yet begun. We did visit the Palazzo Madama. I noticed it from a distance when we first arrived into Torino. From the front it is a baroque palace of stone and marble. But it's backside is medieval and poking out of it's roof are four medieval, tall, round, brick, pointy-topped towers. The juxtaposition is so odd. It reminded me of Steve Martin with the Indian arrow through his head. My little brain thought, "Who shoved those pointy medieval towers through that baroque palazzo roof." Sometimes an addition, restoration, or remodel looks good, smooth, inevitable. I am not saying it looks bad, but this remodel is a pretty startling. So far, we have medieval and baroque. How about some Roman ruins. The Palazzo Madama is built over the remains of an ancient Roman gate that is two-thousand years old. You can see excavated portions of it through glass floors. There it is Roman ruins remodeled into a medieval castle remodeled into a baroque palazzo. In the late-seventeen-hundreds it was the residence of Madama Reale, the royal widow. She put the Madama in the Palazzo Madama. In 1721, she desired and ordered up the construction of a grand foyer--a gigantic rectangle--to be added to the front of the existing structure. It is two-stories tall and they are tall stories, about seventy feet in all. The lower thirty feet are occupied by the two marble stair cases, on the right and on the left. They ascend to the second level atrium whose ceiling soars forty-feet high with continuous tall frames of windows that allow people outside on the Piazza pavement to look up and into the high grandeur, the frescoes, the chandeliers, the larger-than-life-ness of the Royals.
In our time, the building is open to the public. On the ground floor and out back is a recreation of the royal food garden. It is currently flourishing with edibles and wooden cut-outs of chickens and pigs. It is pretty as a picture and camera ready. On the Palazzo roof and through the arches of one of those pointy medieval towers, is an exceptional vista of significant Torino rooftops. The floor below the roof is occupied entirely with glass cases displaying royal ceramics and porcelain. Some of the pieces are as old as six hundred years. The pieces I love in particular are the ones painted with scenes of everyday life or illustrations of folk stories. They are like snapshots in ceramic. On the floor below the ceramics is a very grand ceremonial room suitable for the Senate meetings that occurred there in the nineteenth-Century. Now it is used as a gallery of ancient and avant-garde art. The smaller rooms on either side were once bedrooms. Their old decor is in a perfect state of repair. The walls, floors and ceilings and windows are decorated with wall paper, gold-leaf, mosaic, stained glass, wood inlay, life-size portraits in oil and chandeliers, all in a manner appropriate for the Madama Reale. That one building alone encapsulates two-thousand years of life in Torino. It is a must see.
We walked continuosly in Torino. Aside from the Piazza Castello there are hundreds of other Piazzas of varying interest. And there is the Po River. And the University. And there is food.
On our first night we took advantage of what is called, Aperitivo, which is the cocktail hour. With the purchase of your drink you are provided with free snacks. The snacks vary from place to place. We went to Pastis where the snacks, the stuzzichetti, were one-inch pizza squares, a variety of bruschettas, cubes of artisanal cheeses and salamis, olives, and on and on. At times, the snacks are so excessive that you do not need dinner. That did not get in our way. We went to dinner anyway. We walked continuously and we ate continuously. For instance, I rarely passed a gelato shop without getting a scoop, a piccolo scoop.
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