A Turin for the Better: Italy’s Northern Metropolis : The Town With a French Mountain Mentality Is Worth Discovering for Its Gentle Beauty

The capital of Italy’s Piedmont region is a surprising place, so different from other, better-known Italian cities that it might almost not be in Italy at all. Turin isn’t a raucous and openly sensual metropolis like Rome or Naples. It isn’t picturesque and jam-packed with great art like Florence, or mystical and romantic like Venice. And it isn’t frantically contemporary like its near neighbor (and temperamental opposite), Milan. What it is instead is calm, self-confident and businesslike. Its beauty is gentle, its personality muted. But it has both personality and beauty aplenty--and, though hardly a part of the standard Italian tour, it is very much worth discovering.

I discovered Turin (Torino in Italian) myself about five years ago, more or less by accident. I had spent a tough week in Milan working on a story--tough because the city was hot, crowded with conventioneers, more expensive than ever and just generally difficult to negotiate. Frankly, I couldn’t wait until my stay was over--at which time I planned to drive straight across Piedmont to France. But an Italian-born friend of mine, who lives in Los Angeles, happened to be passing through Turin just then, and since the city is only about an hour from Milan by autoroute, and on the way toward the tunnel, he asked if I’d meet him there for lunch on my way.

I agreed, but not very happily. Great, I thought. From one big, hot, crowded, difficult Italian industrial capital to another. Then I reached Turin. . . .

The contrast with Milan was stunning: The air was at least 10 degrees cooler to begin with, and noticeably cleaner. The light had an unusually warm, soft-edged quality--something about the Alpine atmosphere, probably. The well-marked main road into town led past a long stretch of the Po, its water sparkling with sunlight, its banks glade-green with trees. Trolley cars clanged by in the shade; on the far bank rose verdant hills crowded with villas and hand some apartment buildings. I felt as if I were driving through a park.

Turning away from the river, I headed down a broad, straight boulevard into downtown Turin. Here I began to encounter the most famous and delightful feature of Turin’s urban landscape: the net work of high, wide arcades--nearly eight miles of them, it is said--with which the city’s heart is veined. (“In Turin,” Jean Cocteau once remarked, in appreciation of these porticoes, “one can stroll as if in a forest.”) Then, almost without realizing it, I found myself in the Piazza Carignano, a little Baroque-era gem of a square bounded on one side by the historic restaurant called Del Cambio, where my friend and I were to meet.

Opened in 1757 and refurbished in 1820, Del Cambio was the Conte di Cavour’s favorite haunt back in the days when this great statesman was inventing modern Italy--and his regular table has been preserved, complete with his reading glasses. The entire restaurant is a relic of an earlier time, in fact, with its old-fashioned lyre-back chairs, plush red banquettes, massive crystal chandeliers and 19th-Cen tury decorative glass panels, and the kitchen complements the surroundings particularly well on Fri day evenings by offering special menus based on recipes created for the Savoyard court in the early 1800s.

Our own lunch was a bit more modern, but superb: fried pumpkin blossoms filled with white-truffle cream, the famous local specialty called agnolotti alla piemontese (rings of pasta stuffed with ground veal and spinach, in a sauce made from the pan drippings of roast meat) and finally venison braised in Barolo wine.

“Let’s not have dessert here,” said my friend when we had finished. Instead, he lead me across the piazza to a tiny table outside a place called Gelateria Pepino. Here, we drank excellent coffee and ate creamy zabaglione-flavored ice cream in the gentle afternoon breeze. It was all so pleasant that I decided then and there to come back to Turin one day and get to know the city better. Last year, I got the chance.

This time I came armed with an introduction to one of Turin’s more prominent citizens, Giorgio Lindo. A slender, handsome, 46-year-old Turinese native, Lindo publishes a large-format magazine called Torino, as well as the respected L’Espresso series of hotel, restaurant and wine guides.

He is a lifelong student of the city’s character. “To understand this place,” he told me when we met over glasses of spumante in the bar of the Turin Palace Hotel, “you must understand that we have a French mountain mentali ty.” (The French border is about 30 miles away, and the Alps define the city’s horizons.)

“We spoke French until about 200 years ago,” he continued, “and our dialect and lifestyle are still more French than Italian. And like mountain people everywhere, we work hard, and mind our own business. We really aren’t a very colorful place. Our clothes are stylish but traditional. Even our cars are mostly brown or gray, rarely white or red. We don’t like spectacle and we don’t like to show off.”

If Turin isn’t on the international tourist circuit, he added, it was fine with the locals. “This is a serious city,” he explained, “a business city, with most of the big industries revolving around cars--from Fiat and Lancia, which are headquartered here, to companies making automobile bodies and tires, companies that sell insurance, banks. We don’t like tourism very much here because it just isn’t our concern. But we are very friendly to individual tourists, and though we are not like Florence or Rome with all their monuments and museums, we do have a few good things for our international friends to see and do.”

Chief among these, I found out as I wandered around the place on my own for the next few days, is simply the centro, the city center, itself. Turin is rich with Renaissance and (especially) Baroque architecture, and full of beautiful churches, squares and palaces--among them the elegantly handsome 17th-Century Piazza San Carlo, which echoes the Place des Vosges in Paris with its superbly regular ocher stucco facades, and the noble Renaissance-era cathedral of San Giovanni Battista, with its masterful Baroque-style chapel of Santa Sindone (in which the so-called Shroud of Turin is preserved--though rarely displayed). Also in city center are the out wardly simple but sumptuously furnished Palazzo Reale on the Piazza Castello and the Palazzo Madama, on the same piazza, a surprisingly graceful grab bag as semblage of Roman, medieval, and 18th-Century elements, bright with windows, that has been called one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe.

Then there are those arcades. Illuminated with ornate antique neon signs advertising cafes and shops, protected from traffic and from sun and rain, alive with conversation and with social interplay, they fulfill the function that might be served by market squares or beachfront esplanades in Italian cities of a more outgoing kind. They seem the emblem of a wealthy but self-effacing society like this one, in fact, and they make the visitor’s perambulations a delight.

For anyone less interested in perambulation, Turin’s Museo dell’Automobile or Automobile Museum is a must. Displaying hundreds of vehicles, largely but not entirely Italian, dating from the early 1900s to the present day, it is said to be the most popular museum in Piedmont, welcoming about 100,000 visitors a year.

Fine dining is another of Turin’s attractions. The local cuisine tends to be rich but refined, with a slight but palpable French accent. One of the best restaurants in town, besides the aforementioned Del Cambio, is Vecchia Lanterna, where the food varies from the traditional to the experimental--from duck breast with orange sauce (which is Italian, not French, in origin) to an unusual risotto with pureed hop shoots--delicious! Another sophisticated eating place is Neuv Caval ‘d Brons. The reincarnation of a famous old cafe that was long the center of social life on the Piazza San Carlo, the Caval is now an elegant dining room with coffered ceilings and Savoy blue walls. The menu includes such specialties as turbot and borage dumplings in a sauce of scallop coral and scampi served on a bed of paper-thin potatoes.

Turin is also well-supplied with attractive, turn-of-the-century cafes, specializing in small sand wiches of the kind Italians call tramezzini or “little in-betweens.” Especially recommended: the jewel-like little Caffe Mulassano, famous for its lobster salad sandwiches; Caffe Platti, with its frothy cake-frosting ceiling, serving what might well be the best coffee and tea in Turin, as well as very good sandwiches (anchovies and butter, green pepper salad, tuna and egg, etc.) on multicolored breads, and Caffe Torino, once called “the city’s smartest drawing room,” with its ornate interior and unusually good pastries.

Though Turin is not noted for its hotels, almost everybody likes the aforementioned Turin Palace-- old-fashioned, superbly-run, and the only hotel in town with a five-star rating from the Italian government. I stayed here myself, and found it very comfortable and quiet (despite its downtown loca tion). The Jolly chain’s Principi di Piemonte, popular with business men, looks unpromising from the outside with its facing of dirty beige marble and grimy brick, but is good-looking and efficient within. The vaguely bohemian Victoria has been recently redone in a very pretty antique-filled, country-house style, and gives onto a large garden. The Villa Sassi, a 17th-Century mansion in the hills above the city, surrounded by trees and subalpine meadows, would be quite paradisiacal were it not for the smallness of the rooms and the frequency with which noisy con ferences, weddings and other events are booked into the place. (The hotel is run by the El Toula restaurant chain, and houses a branch of that establishment.)

Before leaving Turin on this second visit of mine, I went back to Del Cambio for lunch--this time with noted Piedmontese winemaker Angelo Gaja, whose Barbarescos are among Italy’s best (and most expensive) red wines. The food, on this occasion based mostly on fresh, meaty porcini mushrooms, was as good as it had been the first time.

Because Gaja attended the University of Turin, and confesses to a great affection for the city, I asked him over coffee for a few words about the place. “Torino is sometimes not well-understood by visitors at first,” he replied. “It can seem like a cold town, but it is really not cold at all. It is a quiet town, and sometimes a beautiful one--a good modern town, but, at the same time, a town with a dream of the past.”

GUIDEBOOK

Touring Turin

Getting There: There are daily nonstop flights to Turin on Alitalia from Rome, Milan, and other major Italian cities, and on Alitalia and/or national carriers from London, Paris, Frankfurt, and other European capitals. Frequent rail service connects Turin with the entire Western European rail network. Turin is about 135 miles from Nice by the A-8 (in France) and A-10 (in Italy) autoroutes, about 85 miles from Milan on the A-4, and about 155 miles from Geneva, through the Mont Blanc Tunnel.

Where to Stay: Despite its grim exterior, the Jolly Hotel Principi di Piemonte, Via Gobetti 15, is comfortable and efficient. Telephone 011-39-11-532-153, double room about $250. The Turin Palace, Via Sacchi 8, may be the city’s best hotel; central and very quiet. Tel. 011-39-11-515-511, double about $250. Victoria, Via Nino Costa 4, has a country-house style and is filled with antiques. Tel. 011-39- 11-553-710, double about $150. Villa Sassi, Strada del Traforo del Pino 47, is a former mansion in the hills above the city. Tel. 011-39- 11-890-556, double about $275.

Where to Eat: Del Cambio, Piazza Carignano 2, local telephone (11) 546-690, $150; Neuv Caval ‘D Brons, Piazza San Carlo 157, tel. (11) 553-491, $100; Vecchia Lanterna, Corso Re Umberto 21, tel. (11) 537-047. Cafes: Caffe Mulassano, Piazza Castello 15; Caffe Platti, Corso Vittorio Emanuele 72; Caffe Torino, Piazza San Carlo 204.

What to Do: Gallerie Sabauda, Via Accademia delle Scienze 6, local telephone (11) 547-440; Museo dell’Automobile, Corso Unita d’Italia 40, tel. (11) 677-666; Museo Egizio, Via Accademia delle Scienze 6, tel. (11) 537-581.

For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles 90025, (310) 820-0098.