Turin Audio Tours

Turin became Italy's first capital in 1861 when the Risorgimento finally unified the peninsula, and held the role for just four years before the new country moved the government south toward Rome. What those years produced was a city with a European ambition that still shows in the Baroque grid of porticoed streets that cover the old centre. Twenty-eight kilometres of covered arcades, the portici, run through Turin's streets, allowing residents to walk from the Piazza Castello to the Piazza Vittorio Veneto in almost any weather without getting wet. The Mole Antonelliana, begun in 1863 as a synagogue and now housing the National Museum of Cinema, stands 167 metres above the rooftops and is visible from the Alps that frame the city to the north and west.

The House of Savoy governed from here for three centuries before Italian unification, and the evidence is everywhere: the Palazzo Madama at the centre of the Piazza Castello, the Palazzo Carignano with its undulating Baroque facade, the Royal Palace, the Venaria Reale outside the city.

The Shroud of Turin, the linen cloth believed by many to be the burial cloth of Christ, is kept in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist and displayed only rarely, most recently in 2015. Gianduiotto chocolate, made from hazelnuts from the Langhe hills blended with cocoa at a lower than usual proportion because of a Napoleonic trade embargo on cocoa imports, was invented in Turin in the early 19th century and is still made in foil-wrapped nuggets by Caffarel.