TORINO È LA MIA CITTÀ
My heart beats fast as soon as I pronounce the name of my city - T O R I N O
There are billions of cities in the world but the most significant and beautiful to every expat’s heart is his or her hometown.
Turin changes but not as rapidly as other big European cities. Turin has a difficult soul, split into two: one side of it wants to become modern and competive, a central Italian and European city; the other side of its complicated soul is like a lazy and conservative old lady, who wants to preserve the glorious past the city witnesses through its historic traces.
Traces left by different times of history are still alive all over the city. Turin is a old and charming lady founded around the 3rd century BC by a Celto-Ligurian population whose name was Taurini, though history does not state much about them. We know that the former chief town of this population, before becoming a Roman settlement, witnessed during the Second Punic Wars the invasion of the very famous Carthaginian warrior Hannibal.
Indeed, Turin saw a huge number of remarkable men who made human history and culture: Cesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Kings of Savoy, Alexandre Dumas, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others.
The capital city of Piemonte has a lot to tell; its voice is loud but sometimes ignored. Since the early 1900s Turin has been considered as the Italian Detroit, as FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino- Italian Automobiles Factory of Turin) has had until recent years its productions and headquarters in the city. Now, as FIAT’s assembly lines moved abroad or just elsewhere in Italy, Turin can finally explode this myth and count on its architectural beauties, its historic fascination and its young and vibrant university European lifestyle, leaving an overwhelming unique impression behind every single visitor; even to me.
Its royal majestity astonishes everyone. Sometimes it is visible, sometimes it is hidden behind modern buildings and needs to be found out. The royal elegance of the city persuades to think to be in a little Paris, as stunning baroque palazzi and churches still reverberate the grandeur of the Savoy monarchy and remind of the past, when Turin became the first Italian capital city soon after the Risorgimento, the Italian Unification, in 1861.
Turin and Mole Antonelliana is a perfect binomial. The Mole, as the inhabitants of Turin call it, is not only the symbol of the city, but also an Italian icon. This unusual tall building designed by the architect Alessandro Antonelli and first conceived to become a synagoge, dominates the city skyline but is only visible either while standing in front of it, or from a high spot. The Mole is hidden by the surrounding building, but its cupola whose tip tends to reach the sky, makes it 167m high. Inside it is hosted the National Cinema Museum, with a brilliant collection showing the very beginning of cinematography of the 1890s and mentioning then Italian cinema’s big names such as Sophia Loren, Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini and many other prestigious figures of the neo-realism.
Although Turin is my hometown, whenever I travel back to visit my parents and friends, I enjoy taking a walk around the centre. I explore la mia città as if it was the first time we bump into eachother. I walk kilometers all around, without a precise purpose and destination. I run into street artists playing old melodies, I go to my favourite bookstore, I stare at the windows of antique shops, I drink a coffee or a traditional bicerin in one of the thousand historic cafés the city still takes to heart. In such cafés the air is vibrant. You may sit at a table where years and years ago Nietzsche, Alessandro Manzoni or Garibaldi were sitting. Historic cafés host nowadays not only their history, but most of all locals. Elderies sitting there, drinking café or Martini, smoking their pipe or sigar, reading the newspaper and commenting news saying “When I was younger…”: the atmosphere is unique.
There is a certain fascination in all this. A fascination which is hard to tell and describe. You should go to Turin and try to understand it on your own. To many its charm is given thanks to its perfect natural location at the feet of the Italian Alps, to others thanks to its royal but meanwhile working class’ soul; to me thanks to its historic, cultural and human meaning. Turin seems to talk sometimes while sitting on a bench reading a book or looking at a building. It talks about kings and queens, revolutions, Italian Unification and even more about an iconic worldwide well-known Italian lifestyle.
Whenever I travel back to my city, I wish I could stay more. I think this is the real expat spirit. An expat leaves and parts from his or her hometown to reach the highest and most brilliant life goals, he or she dreams big, but once the expat comes back to his or her hometown the achievement’s frezy suddenly freezes. In that precise moment only one picture comes to his or her mind: his or her family’s smiles, like in the picture here below.
