Turin, the princess worker

During its tumultuous existence, Turin was at one with the grandeur of the Roman Empire and the opulent splendours of the kingdoms of France and Italy, of which it became the capital for a time. Stripped of its royal finery, Turin laid the foundations of a democratic and modern Italy, and became a working class city by developing the country's most important industrial centre at the beginning of the 20th century. Turin is now an extraordinary and changing city where the splendours of royalty mix with industrial life and where the traditions of the past mingle with a poliform cultural modernity.

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Turin was founded by Celtic tribes from Liguria (the Taurians) in the third century BC under the name Taurasia. It was besieged and destroyed in the year 218 BC by the Carthaginian armies of Hannibal and their elephants, who were marching on Rome after their famous crossing of the Alps. Rebuilt, it became a Roman colony and fortress under Julius Caesar in the first century BC under the name Augusta Taurinorum.

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The Porta Palazzo market is the largest open market in Europe, where food, clothing and other goods are traded daily. A vast flea market, the Balon, is held at weekends. A total of 49 open markets are held in Turin every week.

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Turin is home to many historic churches built during its millennial existence. One of them, the Cathedral (Duomo) of Turin, has since the 16th century housed the most famous but also the most controversial relic in the Christian world, the Holy Shroud, a shroud which is said to have covered Jesus Christ at the moment of his death, and on which a negative image of his body and face was printed. The authenticity of the Holy Shroud is not recognised by the church and science has dated the shroud to the Middle Ages, but the technique or phenomenon that created the image on the shroud is still unknown today.

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Turin was built on the banks of the river Po, the longest river in Italy which crosses the country from west to east into the Adriatic sea. The Po flows in the centre of the Padana plain, born of the great glaciations of the quaternary era, a million years ago. Previously, the Adriatic Sea extended through an immense gulf to the Maritime Alps, further West of Turin, near the Mediterranean Sea.

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The Mole Antonelliana is the emblematic building of Turin. Inaugurated in 1889 after works that lasted more than twenty years, its height of 167.5 metres serves as the reference point for all the other buildings in the city that cannot surpass it.

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The famous Lingotto building was inaugurated in 1923 as a production plant for FIAT automobiles. It had a test track on its roof, the only one of its kind in the world, consisting of two 400-metre straight lines and two parabolic curves where new models were tested. The cars went directly from the ground floor to the roof track via a five-storey helical access ramp. Today, Lingotto is home to Europe's largest multifunctional congress centre, as well as a state-of-the-art cinema complex and shopping mall. The test track is still used for demonstrations and can be visited.

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Turin is the city through which cinema entered Italy, when in March 1896 the first public screening took place. A large number of films have been shot in Turin including Kingsman Origin (Matthew Vaughn, 2021 release), Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007), Hannah and her sisters (Woody Allen, 1986), Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) and War and Peace (1956, King Vidor). The Mole Antonelliana, the emblematic building in Turin, today houses one of the most famous museum of cinema in the world.