Turin: Capital of history, art, food and wine

By Kathleen Olive

How much do you know about Turin, tucked away in the north-westernmost corner of Italy? Probably not much, as it’s never received significant recognition from international visitors to Italy, despite its grand squares, colonnaded streets, superlative museums of art and antiquities, and reputation as the birthplace of Italy’s Slow Food gastronomy movement.

From the first century BCE, Rome took a close interest in the site of present-day Turin. At the upper reaches of the mighty Po, so crucial to the transportation of goods and people, and nestled underneath the western Alps that form the modern border between Italy and France, it was a strategic base for the expanding empire, and the well-preserved Porta Palatina in the centre of Turin is still one of the world’s best-preserved and oldest Roman city-gates.

Turin’s Porta Palatina, continually used from the Augustan era to the Middle Ages (image: Unsplash)

From the eleventh century, Turin became part of the lands of the Counts of Savoy. With territory covering the major alpine passes from Chambéry to Vaud, the House of Savoy extended its influence as far west as Nice and, by the nineteenth century, down to Genoa. In the seventeenth century, successive generations of connoisseurs and patrons of the arts ensured that Turin, capital of the Savoy from 1563, was rejuvenated by Guarino Guarini (1624-83) and Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736), two of the Baroque’s greatest architects, and by artists such as Giovanna Garzoni, a still-life painter who left some of her most interesting botanical works and miniatures at the Savoy court.

A choral recital inside Guarino Guarini’s San Lorenzo church, Turin, a Savoy masterpiece of baroque architecture (film taken by Dr Kathleen Olive)

The Savoy were great collectors, too. They amassed priceless manuscripts, such as the van Eyck brothers’ Turin-Milan Hours, and a handful of superlative Flemish works by Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and others (still in Turin’s Galleria Sabauda). In the eighteenth century, Savoy statesmen began to take a close interest in Egyptology, and the thousands of artefacts they excavated from all over North Africa are the reason why Turin’s recently-renovated Museo Egizio is considered the finest collections of Egyptology in the world after Cairo’s museum.

It was also in the nineteenth century that Turin became a centre of the Risorgimento (‘resurgence’), a political movement that led to the unification of Italy. By 1861, Turin had been proclaimed the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and an early House of Deputies of one of the incarnations of the new kingdom can still be visited inside Palazzo Carignano in central Turin. Turin rapidly embraced industrialisation and from the nineteenth century, manufacturing giants such as FIAT changed the city forever, as can be seen in the remarkable Lingotto district, with the Pinacoteca Agnelli designed for the industrialists by Renzo Piano on the factory’s rooftop racetrack.

Renzo Piano’s Pinacoteca Agnelli, on the FIAT factory’s rooftop racetrack (image: Unsplash)

In 1986, a group of Italian gastronomes – horrified by the opening of a McDonald’s at the foot of Rome’s Spanish Steps – inaugurated a movement celebrating Italy’s traditions of gastronomy and viticulture. Its approach, the antithesis of “fast food”, would become known as the Slow Food movement, and it now holds its most important event, the Salone del Gusto, in Turin every two years. It’s the world’s largest food and wine fair, and it’s fitting that Turin is indelibly associated with its principles, as its region of Piedmont also gives us prestigious white truffles from Alba, and the red wines Barolo, Nebbiolo and Barbéra, in addition to spumante from Asti.

Tending the vines outside the village of Barolo, in Le Langhe wine region (photo taken by Dr Kathleen Olive)

Limelight Arts Travel’s Turin, Genoa and the French Riviera tour explores Turin in depth, together with other significant regions that formed part of the Savoy duchy and kingdom.
Read more or reserve your place on the tour here.

EXPLORE TURIN with Dr Kathleen Olive

turin, genoa & the french riviera

01-16 May 2025

Discover outstanding art and architecture in Italy and southern France, from the hidden gems of Turin and Genoa and the exuberant modernity of the French Riviera.