Buongusto Tours - Itineraries

Torino tour

DISCOVER A DIFFERENT TORINO!

Discover the different faces, the secret aspects and the intimate spirit of Torino, "the true hour" of this elegant and sophisticated city, too many times reductively known as the “Italian Motown”…

“…conventional tourist routes ignore Torino. There are, in fact, no orange trees as at Taormina, or roses as at Paestum; there are not the magnificent Greek temples of Agrigento, the Coliseum and basilicas of Rome, or the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna. No Ruskin has idealised its ancient stones or its cold mornings; its university has never attracted the foreign students who once flocked into thousands to Padua or Bologna; no scion of the nobility from beyond the Alps ever honoured it with a stay in the obligatory Grand Tour which brought him to Italy to learn fencing and dancing, riding and gallantry.

In the golden age of Italian civilisation that was the Renaissance, when Naples numbered 300.000 inhabitants and Milan and Venice each 150.000, Torino was little more than a village. It later became the capital of a poor and mountainous small state, the Savoy, more inclined to breed bureaucrats and soldiers than art patrons and artists. It was slow in attaining the rank of a real city and underwent a feverish growth only in the age of industrial revolution, which covered many ancient settlements with the sores of urbanisation, with smoky and dreary factories and densely populated tenements.

This is true, but anyone who expects to visit a hive of factories and swarming humanity, an anonymous expanse of concrete and glass, must undeceive himself. Torino is one of the most harmonious and clearly planned cities that exist. In Torino at least four towns survive, one inside the other like Chinese boxes, four moments of clearly defined renewal, where the later doesn't repudiate the earlier but on the contrary projects it into a new dimension, preserving intact the spirits -inflexible will, functional geometry, flashes of repressed inspiration- that informs it.

These four towns are: the Roman Torino; Baroque Torino; Torino of the Risorgimento; (the unification of Italy); Torino of ‘the motor car era’…”

(Luigi Firpo, “Torino, portrait of a city”)

Torino sightseeings programme and prices depending on client’s request.

new: possible cooking classes in place!

please, contact us: paolo@buongustotours.it