Four days in Turin: the Alps at the end of every street
Three nights in Italy's first capital, with the second best Egyptian collection in the world, eighteen kilometres of arcade, and a hill to climb on the last full day.
- Length
- 4 days, 3 nights
- Where you stay
- Turin
- Places
- 10 across 4 days
Turin was laid out as a Roman camp and then rebuilt by a dynasty with something to prove, which is why it is the one Italian city where the streets are straight. Stand at a junction and look west: the road runs dead ahead for a kilometre and stops at the Alps.
It was the capital of the kingdom of Sardinia, then the first capital of united Italy, then the city that built the country's cars, and it has the confidence of all three. It also has almost no queues. The great Egyptian collection, the royal palace, the baroque churches: you walk in.
Four days works because two of them are indoors and two are not. Turin has the mountains an hour away, a river with a hill behind it, and the habit of putting a plate of food in front of anybody who orders a drink at six.
Highlights
- Mummies, papyri and a complete rock-cut tomb, in a collection second only to Cairo's
- A glass lift rising through the hollow middle of the city's landmark tower
- A hilltop basilica reached by a rack tramway, with the whole Alpine arc behind it
- The layered coffee and chocolate drink Turin invented, in the room that invented it
Where to stay
Turin, three nights
A city of about nine hundred thousand people that spent three centuries as a royal capital and most of the twentieth century as a factory town, and has spent the last twenty years working out what to be next. The answer so far involves the food, the museums and a lot of restored industrial buildings.
It rewards looking up and looking down the street. The baroque here is grander and colder than the Roman kind, the palaces are Savoyard rather than papal, and the mountains are in the frame from almost everywhere.
Day by day
Day 1 in Turin
Roman Turin, the cathedral, and a very old café
The old quarter north west of the centre is where the city started, and the street plan is still the Roman one. At the top of it stands a gate the Romans built and nobody ever knocked down: two tall towers and a double archway, sitting in a patch of grass surrounded by traffic.
The cathedral behind it is plain by Italian standards and holds the most argued-about object in Christianity, which is not on display and will not be. The chapel built for it burned in 1997 and took twenty-one years to restore, and it reopened as one of the strangest interiors in Europe: black marble, and a dome built as a lattice of stacked arches that seems to recede forever.
End the afternoon with a bicerin, which is espresso, drinking chocolate and cream in three layers that you are not supposed to stir.
- 15:30
Porta Palatina
HistoricA Roman city gate still standing to its full height, with two sixteen-sided towers flanking four arches. Two thousand years old, free, and usually ignored by everybody walking past it to the market.
- 16:45
Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist
ReligiousLate fifteenth century and modest, with the seventeenth century chapel for the Shroud opening off the far end. Go for the dome: Guarini stacked layer on layer of arches, each turned against the one below, so the whole thing lifts away from you as you look up.
- 18:30
Caffe al Bicerin
EatA tiny panelled café opposite the sanctuary that has been serving the same drink since the eighteenth century. There is often a queue and it is worth twenty minutes of your life.
With more time: The sanctuary next door to the café is the city's most-visited church, hung floor to ceiling with painted thanks for accidents survived, which is a more interesting hour than the architecture suggests.
Day 2 in Turin
Egypt, the palace, and Guarini's other dome
The Egyptian collection here was started in 1824 by a king who bought up an entire consular collection, and it is second in the world only to Cairo's. Champollion, who deciphered hieroglyphs, said the road to Memphis and Thebes ran through Turin, which is still roughly true.
It is not a room of highlights, it is a proper museum: two floors of statuary, a complete tomb found undisturbed with its furniture and food, and papyrus documents including a plan of a mine and a map of the underworld. Three hours minimum.
The afternoon is the Savoy state in two buildings. The palace is one long sequence of gilded rooms plus an armoury that is one of the best in Europe, and the church next to it hides a dome that has to be seen from directly underneath to make sense.
- 09:00
Museo Egizio
HistoricStatues of Ramesses and Amenhotep, the intact tomb of an architect and his wife, and rooms of papyri, laid out chronologically with good English labelling throughout. Book a morning slot.
- 12:30
Lunch under the arcades
EatThe porticoed streets between the museum and the palace are full of cheap set lunches aimed at office workers. Sit inside, eat two courses, pay very little.
- 13:45
Palazzo Reale
CultureThe Savoy residence, done up in the seventeenth century to make a point to Versailles, and now several museums in one ticket. If time is short go straight to the Royal Armoury, which is a hall of horses in full plate.
- 16:00
San Lorenzo
VisitFrom the square outside it looks like a palace wall with no church behind it, because Guarini was not allowed a facade. Inside is the wildest dome in Italy: eight ribs crossing over a void, with the light coming through the gaps.
With more time: The gallery of Savoy paintings shares the palace complex and is included in the same ticket: Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Bruegel and a very good Flemish room, and almost nobody in it.
Day 3 in Turin
The Mole, the river, and the hill
The building on every postcard of Turin was commissioned as a synagogue in the 1860s, grew out of all proportion to its budget, was handed to the city half finished, and ended up as the national cinema museum. It is the tallest brick building in Europe, and there is a glass lift that goes up the middle of the empty hall to a viewing deck at eighty-five metres.
The museum inside is better than it needs to be: a spiral ramp of film history around the base of the dome, with deckchairs in the middle of the hall so you can lie back and watch clips projected on the walls.
In the afternoon cross the river and go up. A rack tramway from 1884 hauls you eighteen minutes up a wooded hill to a basilica with the Alps behind it, and it is the view that explains the city's geography better than any map.
- 09:30
Mole Antonelliana
CultureBuy the combined ticket for the lift and the museum. The lift runs up the open middle of the hall with nothing under your feet but a glass floor, and the deck at the top has the whole grid of the city and the mountains behind it.
- 12:30
Lunch by the river
EatThe streets between the Mole and the bridge do a good cheap lunch, and the riverside terraces on the far bank are where the city drinks in the evening.
- 14:00
Chiesa della Gran Madre di Dio
ReligiousA neoclassical copy of the Pantheon closing off the view across the bridge, put up to celebrate the king coming back after Napoleon. The steps in front of it are the best free seat in Turin at six in the evening.
- 15:00
Basilica of Superga
ReligiousBuilt to thank the Virgin for a French siege that failed in 1706, with the Savoy kings buried in the crypt. In 1949 an aircraft carrying the entire Torino football team hit the hillside just behind it, and the memorial there is still covered in scarves.
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With more time: The car museum, south of the centre on the metro, is a serious industrial design collection rather than a shed full of Ferraris, and the roof of the old Fiat factory beyond it still has the test track on top of it with an art gallery bolted to one end.
Day 4 in Turin
The market, and where Italy was invented
Go to the market first thing. It is said to be the largest open-air market in Europe, it runs six days a week across a square the size of several football pitches, and it is where the whole city actually shops: produce outside, meat and cheese in the halls, clothes and secondhand everything at the far end.
Then walk south, under the arcades, to the building where the first parliament of a united Italy sat in 1861. The museum inside covers how a peninsula of small states became a country, in the rooms where a good deal of it was argued out.
Porta Nuova is ten minutes further on and the trains north and west leave from there.
- 08:30
Porta Palazzo
LandmarkGo before ten, take cash, and eat as you walk. The covered halls behind the open stalls are where the fish, the cheese and the north African food are, and prices drop sharply as the morning ends.
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- 11:00
Risorgimento Museum
VisitThirty rooms on the making of Italy, in the palace where the first national parliament met, including the chamber itself. Better than it sounds, and the only museum in the country that tells this story properly.
- 13:00
Last lunch, then Porta Nuova
EatVitello tonnato or a plate of agnolotti in one of the old restaurants near the arcades, then a flat ten minute walk to the platforms.
With more time: If the trains work in your favour, the enormous royal hunting palace north of the city is the alternative morning: a Savoy attempt to outdo Versailles, with a gallery of white stucco and glass that runs the length of the building and is worth the bus ride on its own.
Before you go
Where to stay
The grid between Porta Nuova station and the main squares is central, arcaded and full of hotels, and it puts almost everything here within a twenty minute walk. The Quadrilatero Romano, the older tangle of lanes north west of the cathedral, is the good-looking option and where the evening happens.
San Salvario, immediately east of the station, is cheaper, mixed and lively, with the best cheap eating in the city. Avoid the blocks directly around Porta Palazzo late at night, which are perfectly fine by day and less pleasant after dark.
Getting around
Walk, and use the arcades. Turin has around eighteen kilometres of them, built so the royal family could cross the city without being rained on, and they connect the station to the palace almost continuously.
There is one metro line, which is driverless and useful for the car museum and the Lingotto end of town, plus a dense tram network. The rack tramway up the hill to the basilica leaves from Sassi, across the river, and runs to a timetable worth checking the night before.
Tickets and opening
Book the Egyptian Museum for a morning slot in season and turn up on the hour. Nothing else here needs advance booking, which is genuinely unusual for an Italian city of this size.
Most museums close on Monday, and the royal residences outside the city keep shorter winter hours. The Shroud itself is not on display: it is kept rolled in the cathedral and shown perhaps once a generation, so what you can see is the chapel it lives in and a small museum about it.
Eating and drinking
Turin invented vermouth, industrialised chocolate, and turned the free bar snack into a full buffet. From about half past six the historic cafés and the bars along the river put out food with the drinks, and in this city that reliably amounts to dinner.
The regional cooking is rich, northern and heavily influenced by France: raw beef dressed with lemon, veal in tuna sauce, agnolotti the size of a thumbnail, and a hot anchovy and garlic dip that a table shares over a burner. Hazelnut chocolate was invented here when Napoleon's blockade cut off the cocoa, and it is still what to bring home.
Turin does not sell itself, which is most of the appeal. There is no queue at the door of a great museum, the best café in the city is a room with eight tables, and the hills behind the river are full of people from Turin rather than people photographing it.
Take the tram up, get a seat on the left, and look back at the mountains.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Turin worth four days?
- Yes, and it is one of the few Italian cities where four days is not a stretch: the Egyptian museum alone is half a day, the royal residences are another, and the hill and the river fill the rest. It also has almost no crowds, which changes how much you can do in a day.
- Can I see the Turin Shroud?
- Almost certainly not. It is kept rolled and sealed in the cathedral and put on public display only for special occasions, sometimes decades apart. What you can see any day is the chapel built for it and a small museum with a full-size photographic copy and the history of the arguments.
- Is Turin good for a winter trip?
- Very. The arcades make the weather irrelevant, the food is winter food, the chocolate season runs from autumn, and the Alps are two hours away by train if you want a day in the snow. Cold and clear is also when the mountain views are best.
- What about the royal palaces outside the city?
- There are several, and the biggest is a bus ride north with a stucco gallery that is the single most impressive room in Piedmont. It is a half day at least, so it replaces something rather than fitting in. The hunting lodge to the south west is smaller, stranger and easier to reach.
- How does it compare with Milan?
- Cheaper, quieter, better looking and much less busy, with a stronger sense of being a place rather than an economy. Milan has the greater art and the better nightlife. Turin has the mountains, the arcades and the feeling that you found it yourself.