“Not even the Italians know Turin! They only know FIAT! FIAT! FIAT!”
    So said Michele, a spry, elegant, elderly Turinese who took my wife and me for a cup of rich, bittersweet coffee and chocolate called a “capriccio” at the historic Caffè Baratti e Milano, opened in 1875 on Turin’s broad Piazza Castello.  We’d met him just minutes before on our search for the equally famous café named Bicerin, only to learn from Michele that it was closed on Wednesdays.
    He didn’t seem troubled by his statement that the world outside of Piedmont, including the rest of Italy, did not regard his hometown as worth visiting, unless it was to see the Automobile Museum.  “It is not a bad thing not to have so many tourists,” said Michele, who had a salt-and-pepper beard and wore an artfully thrown scarf around his shoulders. He never gave us his last name and seemed to have retired to the life of a boulevardier known to every bartender and barrista in Turin.
    These days, as Covid keeps the lid on tourism in Italy, visitors are fewer than ever.
    “Look around you,” he said, smiling. “Turin is never noisy, never crowded, except”—his eyes rolled back—“during those Winter Olympics! So we Turinesi have our restaurants and cafés all to ourselves most of the time.  Our Mercato sells every kind of food and wine you could possibly want, and the original EATaly is just a few kilometers that way.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the gargantuan food market and restaurant complex established in 2007 in the out-of-the-way Lingotto district. He shrugged. “Maybe I visit someday.” And then he was off, saying he was meeting friends at a trattoria whose name he neglected to share with us.
    I must admit that I, too, had little knowledge of Turin, having only paid brief visits to the city in the past while attending a food conference or simply passing through to tour the beauty of the Piedmontese countryside and wine country, where some of the region’s most noted restaurants, like Combal.Zero in Rivoli, Locanda del Pilone in Alba and Delle Antiche Contrade in Cuneo, are located.  My earlier visits had, however, disabused me of any thought that Turin was a drab, self-absorbed northern industrial city.  It is worth noting that director Michelangelo Antonioni used Milan in “La Notte” (1961), Rome in “L’Eclisse” (1962) and Ravenna in “Il Deserto Rosso” (1964)—not Turin—to depict the deadening effect of industrialization on the soul of modern Italy.
    On my last, recent extended visit, I found the heart of the city among the most beautiful in Europe, justly famous for its long, graceful series of arcades, the grandeur of its vast piazzas, and its stately and highly efficient grid pattern.  The Po River flows as majestically through Turin as the Arno does through Florence and the Tiber through Rome. 
    Fiat has, of course, dominated and buoyed Turin’s fortunes since 1899 (it still produces 37 percent of Italy’s GNP), but the Turinesi are quick to remind people that their city was in fact the first capital of an Italy unified in 1861 under Victor Emmanuel II, whose Royal Palace (below), set in the huge square entered from the broad Via Roma, is a spectacular example of a baroque opulence intended to reflect the proud independence of Piedmont, which only 50 years earlier had been annexed by Napoleon Bonaparte.  Upon invading Italy in 1800, the young Corsican general faced 20,000 Piedmontese and 11,500 Austrians, but his tactical genius divided his enemies and, in embarrassment, King Victor Amadeus II ceded Piedmont to the Corsican, who immediately demolished Turin’s city gates and bastions and renamed the Royal Palace as the Imperial Palace—a decree that horrified and humiliated the Turinesi.  Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 freed Piedmont, whose power increased in the decades leading up to 1861, when it became the capital of the new Italy.
    As an imperial city, Turin’s artistic treasures are exceptionally fine, all in baroque wrappings. Although there is no museum the equivalent of Florence’s Uffizi or the Brera in Milan, the Royal Palace itself—once residence of the powerful Savoy dynasty, taken over by the Italian government in 1946—is crammed with notable works.  My wife and I were amazed at room after room of imperial salons, including Queen Maria Theresa’s quarters, in every color of marble, each with trompe l’oeuil painted ceilings, and we were particularly impressed with the palace’s collections of exquisite tapestries and Chinese porcelain. 
    We toured the city’s Egyptian Museum at the Academy of Science (right), considered one of the finest of its kind in the world, on top of which sits the admirable Sabauda Gallery (below), with works by Bronzino, Veronese, Jan Van Eyck and Van Dyck. And to gain a sense of the unique way that Piedmontese royalty could actually welcome the red-shirted rebels of Garibaldi’s army, the Museum of the Risorgimento in the Palazzo Carignano, where the first parliament of 1861 met, depicts the region’s history from the 19th century through Unification, and on through two world wars.
    The splendid Duomo of St. John the Baptist, still home to the now wholly discredited Shroud of Turin, is the city’s only true example of pre-baroque Renaissance architecture. And, as everywhere else in Italy, there seems a church or chapel on every block.
         Uniquely Turin, however, is its National Museum of Cinema (below), set inside a landmark 500-foot tower originally designed as a synagogue in 1863 by Alessandro Antonelli.  We wound from hall to hall and room to room over five floors, flanked by flickering images of early shadow cartoons and the first primitive, silent efforts of Thomas Edison; within the play of chiaroscuro and expressionist lighting that evoked “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” there are mini-theaters and long corridors lined with huge movie posters from every era.  There is also a futuristic café-restaurant on the ground floor whose starkness, color and light could be a setting for a bar in “Star Wars” or “Bladerunner.”
         But if you ask a Turinese where his city’s true artistic achievements lie, he might well say they are in those beautiful arched walkways that line miles of streets and plazas throughout the city center.  Of even height, woven throughout the city so as to connect with one another, the arcades were built over the course of two centuries, principally as shelter from Piedmontese winters but also as showcases of banks and boutiques, antique pharmacies and food shops, and, more than anything else, cafés and candy emporiums.  Look above their doorways and you see stencils and carvings from the 18th and 19th centuries.  Their façades are done in black marble, or richly varnished mahogany, usually in the baroque style but also in more “modern” styles of Art Nouveau or Art Déco, and they act very much like picture frames for paintings.
    One of the most famous is Baratti & Milano (1875; below), which bears the imperial crest given it by the Vittorio II.  The King and Garibaldi toasted the Reunification at Caffé Mulussano, later relocated in 1907 and done in the sleek art deco style of that period. Litterateurs have long made Caffé Fiorio (1873) their second home, and in his day Fiat founder Gianni Agnelli passed his few idle hours at Caffé Piatti (1875). And while each has its secrets of coffee making, it is likely that the locally produced Lavazza coffee is the starting point for the artfulness.  While café culture vitalized every large city in Italy during the 19th century, none but Turin brought it to an art form in and of itself, where the cafes were extravagant testimony to the luxurious pleasures of taking time to sit, drink and talk.  Indeed, it is the arcades that allow for such an extravagance of cafes barely imitated in Venice’s Piazza San Marco.
          Through the spotless windows we saw countless displays of the most beautifully crafted chocolates, marzipan, and sugared fritters in pastel colors, pink paper, gold foil, arrayed in painted tin boxes or set on lace doilies.  The soft lighting inside is never harsh, never low, imparting a Christmas ornament’s appeal to the confections every day of the year.
         And then there is the aroma of the chocolate itself, almost always commingled with coffee set on the zinc or marble counters, where white-coated barristas grind, pack, adjust, steam, fizz, and present their handiwork in a manifestation of Turin’s deeply ingrained coffee culture, richer than anywhere else in coffee-obsessed Italy. The thunder of the shuddering coffee machine, the clink of the cups and saucers hitting the bar and the tinkle of the little spoons in the saucer never lets up.  The barristas pour a glass of Asti spumante for some, a tipple of vermouth—created in Turin by Antonio Benedetto Carpano in 1786—or a dark, bittersweet amaro digestive for others. A waiter delivers a slice of sugar-dusted cake, covered with satiny dark chocolate, with a filling of the chocolate-and-hazelnut cream gianduja that is also an invention of Turin.
         There are many stories as to how gianduja got its name, sometime in the 19th century, when chocolate and coffee shops had become the rage throughout Europe.  Turin tradition has it that the name derives from “Giovanni della doja” or “Gion d’la duja”  (“John with a pint of wine in his hands”), a popular commedia dell arte marionette created by Gioacchino Bellone di Raccongi first exhibited in the city as of 1808.  Others contend it was named after di Oja, a hamlet near Bellone’s hometown, and that the name is really Giovanni di Oja.
         Whatever the origin of its name, gianduja made a tremendous contribution to European chocolate candy as we know it, and in Turin, hazelnuts seem inseparable from chocolate in any form.  Indeed, Turin is chocolate mad, and yet another of its finest sweet ideas was bicerin, a small rounded glass with a metal handle (from which it gets its name) of hot espresso, chocolate, and milk.  Various aficionados debate the origins of this totemic Turinese concoction, though the most widely accepted was that it was first made at Caffè al Bicerin, which opened on the Piazza della Consolata in 1763.  (Incidentally, the church across the piazza has one of the most extraordinary interiors in Turin.)
         Like the equally famous though not nearly so old Caffé Sant’ Eustachio in Rome, Caffè al Bicerin (above) is a revered monument to coffee and chocolate, a dim, fifteen-by-twenty-five-foot room with tiny marble tables, candles that seem votive, antique mirrors, dark red banquettes, wall sconces, and old wooden chairs. The cramped counter holds jars of bon bons and chocolates, and the old Faema coffee machine rumbles and roars like a Fiat  assembly line when the glasses of thick, semi-sweet bicerins are made.   My wife and I entered feeling like acolytes, privileged to sit at a tiny table among an array of Turinesi, many of them old men and women for whom a morning bicerin is like receiving Holy Communion, as a restorative against the Piedmontese fog and drizzle.