They’re Passionate, Just Read All of the Banners

Giuseppe Negro, a retired truck driver in his 70s with a gray mustache and plaid beret, is quite happy that the Winter Olympics have come to his hometown of Turin.

But you’d never know it from his face. He doesn’t smile, his eyes do not gleam, even as he praises the Games.

“We are all very happy and trying to make the city look good. This will bring tourists and help the city prosper,” he said, without expression, as he strolled through the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, overtaken by a garish store selling overpriced Olympic memorabilia.

“I’m happy to see the visitors and all the movement,” Negro said. “But for me, it’s nothing. I’ve never been in a stadium in my life. All I ever did was work.”

And that sums up the sometimes puzzling way this city of 950,000 is receiving one of the world’s most lavish sporting events. Delighted to be in the spotlight, yes, but still reticent to show it.

Turin’s history has left it pining for its glory days, pained by a forced second-class status. The first capital of a unified Italy 150 years ago, it was ruled for centuries by the royal Savoy dynasty, then ruled, essentially, by the modern dynasty of the Agnelli clan of Fiat fame. Its faded image today is that of a bleak industrial city, a one-company town, that has fallen on hard times.

And so, the Olympics, and Turin’s multimillion-dollar investment, is meant to change all that.

Yet the Torinese personality, as everyone here will tell you, finds it difficult to get too excited.

“That is our spirit -- we are not too expansive,” said Enrica Sinatra, 55, a purveyor of books on magic and the occult (another favorite Turin pastime) who shut her store early so that she could watch the Olympics’ opening ceremony on TV. “We are a closed people. Maybe because we are up against the mountains. Maybe because of our origins as royal subjects. People should be happy because we are making a comeback.”

On the first day of competition in the 2006 Winter Games, Turin on Saturday looked like many Saturdays. People meandered through historic downtown squares, past pastel Belle Epoque buildings and under arcaded pedestrian passageways, pushing babies in prams, walking dogs and chatting on their cellphones. Snowcapped Alpine peaks peeked from the horizon, under bright, sunny blue skies.

The crowds were bigger than usual, and definitely more cosmopolitan. For every Italian, there was a Korean or Russian face, or a voice speaking English, often loudly. Unlike much of Italy, Turin until now has remained largely isolated from international tourism, and so the flood of foreign visitors is something of a culture shock.

The people of Turin applauded and cheered when the Olympic flame passed through the central San Carlo square on Friday, but they weren’t crying or fainting, as one might expect in the more passionate parts of Italy, such as Naples. Dozens of people interviewed said they were delighted the Games were showing Turin in its best light, but few said they would actually attend an event.

Reserved enthusiasm, or polite excitement, this is how Turin celebrates, said Nadia Venturini, a history teacher at the University of Turin. It might seem blase to outsiders, but for Turin, a rather quiet, work-a-day city, this is high emotion. A little cheer goes a long way, she said.

“I was just sorry that they [Olympic organizers] occupied the plazas with those big metal constructions, which in my opinion are ugly,” she said, referring to the array of newly erected venues, platforms for awarding medals, and TV soundstages in downtown. “It doesn’t allow you to see all of the beauty.”

Venturini was one of several hundred professors, students and others who waited in the cold for Laura Bush to show up at the university, where the wife of the U.S. president donated 200 books from American authors. Bush is presiding over the U.S. delegation to the Olympics.

Leftist demonstrators who had vowed to disrupt her visit did not materialize. In fact, although protesters managed to divert the Olympic flame on its way to Turin a couple of times, they otherwise have failed to muster much action. They’ve seemed as anemic as some of the other Torinese reaction to these Games.

Although the center of Turin is festooned in red and blue Olympic regalia, just a few blocks away, on either side of downtown, another city is revealed where it is difficult to see that the 16-day event is taking place.

That too is part of the sense, at least to the outside world, that interest here in the Games amounts to one big yawn.

The motto of the Games is “Passion Lives Here,” emblazoned on banners hung all over central Turin. As a local newspaper columnist put it, Olympic organizers had to choose the motto because if they didn’t announce that passion existed here, it wouldn’t be evident.

Back downtown, Giorgio Corralini, a retired banker, was shopping with his wife, Germana. They said they were hopeful the Olympics would seal Turin’s transformation from a second-tier, relatively unknown city reliant on a single business -- auto-making -- to a diverse metropolitan center with tourism, service industries and growth.

“This is going to help change our way of life,” Corralini, 70, said.

Adriana Rivetti and her two daughters, who sell luxuriant pieces of Turin’s famous dark chocolate, said they were thrilled that the Games had come to town.

“I’m happy to see all the smiles,” she said. “We usually are a little grumpy.”

Maria and Paolo Gigante, who live in a village just outside Turin, brought their two sons, 8 and 11, into the city Saturday to take a look. “It was so exciting,” Maria said, riding the new subway and seeing streets and buildings cleaned and spiffed up. “The city looks beautiful.”

“Let’s hope it stays that way,” added her husband. “It will depend what the government does with it afterward.”

The Gigantes planned to take their sons to a hockey game between Lithuania and Russia, later in the competition. It will be the first time they’ve seen hockey, a sport not played generally in Italy, and it’s the only match they will attend, since they couldn’t afford tickets to anything else.

One of the first Olympic events with Italian participation was Saturday night’s women’s ice hockey match between Italy and Canada. The Italian team was soundly defeated by Canada. Olympic officials said about 90% of the tickets had been sold, but there were clearly empty seats in the rink.

Few things are more important in Italy than looking good, sustaining the “bella figura,” or good impression. And so with these Games, Turin specifically and Italy generally wants, above all, to look good.

Yet elsewhere in Italy, a country still steeped in regional rivalries and provincial jealousies, the Olympics did not seem to be catching on, at least in the first day.

Television news broadcasts Saturday night dedicated more time to national politics (parliament was dissolved Saturday as a necessary formality ahead of elections scheduled for April 9), yet another speech by the omnipresent, media-grabbing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and the detection of the first case of bird flu in southern Italy.

That said, Italy’s state broadcaster, RAI, reported a record audience for Friday night’s live transmission of the opening ceremony, with a peak of 13.4 million viewers, or 45.6% of all people watching TV, beating Berlusconi’s rival station, Mediaset.