Two days in Turin (Europe 2025 part 10)

Well, clearly I've completely run out of momentum to finish this set. Let's see if I can change that again, starting with the famous old Fiat factory at Lingotto. 

The building is now home to a mall with offices above. For the most part it isn't too interesting, but if you follow the Tim Traveller's Youtube channel, you'll know where this is going! For now, we'll start off with the inclined elevator, something I was very excited to see since this was somehow my first time riding one of them. (Though technically, there's not much of a difference between these and non-counterbalanced funiculars, which I definitely have ridden in the past.) I think this means I've now ridden all of the major types of angled transportation -- funiculars (true counterbalanced and non-counterbalanced), rack railways, inclined elevators, and cable cars (both the aerial kind and the San Francisco kind). 

I probably could have done a full retail set on this mall, but it's just too boring for me to bother. Note the KFC in the last picture -- they're all over northern Italy these days!  I don't remember them being so common when I used to visit Italy, but it seems like they've taken over McDonald's place as the ubiquitous American fast food restaurant. 

 

 

 

The interesting part is up another elevator... 

 ... where paying a few euros lets you out onto the old rooftop test track, now home to an art exhibit with a view! Yes, at one point every Fiat built at this factory was sent on a test drive around the roof before being shipped off. Again, I'd highly recommend the Tim Traveller's video, and he even has a whole series of videos on other rooftop test tracks. 

 At each end is an extremely banked racetrack-style curve that you are absolutely not allowed to walk up at risk of being yelled at by a bored Italian guy standing way off in the distance. Yeah, not very effective, and I'm not sure why they didn't put up a rope to stop people from walking where they aren't supposed to, or at least a multilingual sign. 

 The crazy building floating above the factory is an art gallery. I didn't spend the extra couple euros to visit it since I'm not really into art galleries (and I didn't have a ton of time), but next time I'm in Turin I probably will just since the building looks cool! 

 It's hard to get a sense of how big this is from pictures, but just look at how tiny those people look. 

 It was a beautiful day when I was here, and the Alps were an amazing backdrop. It almost feels like being at home with the Cascades always in the background, except Turin itself is very flat! 

 One of the side buildings (presumably originally offices) is now home to a Pam grocery store. 

 Here's the art gallery again. The shape reminds me of a barge. 

It's weird to look down into the courtyard and see large trees in the middle of a building! The one level with different windows is the mall; this should be somewhere around where the KFC is (if I'm not completely turned around). 

 

The arched bridge on the left connects Lingotto to the Olympic Village from the 2006 Winter Olympics, which (in true European fashion) still sits abandoned today. I had thought the development in the foreground was on the Olympic Village site, but it appears that is instead taking over part of the old railyard that the bridge was built to cross. 

 

Lingotto's courtyard is divided into four parts by three cross-connecting buildings. The northern one has the museum on top of it, the middle one has nothing, and the southern one has... this. On one end of the structure is a helipad; on the other end is a large glass dome that seemed to be mostly empty. I have no idea what this is for, and it appears to predate the Olympics so it doesn't seem to have been one of the many Olympics-related vanity projects. All I can think of is the insane amount of structure that must have been required to build a cantilevered helipad! 

 And here's the south end turnaround curve, above one of the enclosed courtyard sections that are now part of the mall. 

This angle makes the helipad/dome complex look like some sort of sci-fi machine perched on top of the building! 

This is presumably one of the ramps up from the factory below. It's shockingly narrow -- clearly they weren't building very large cars here! 

 The down ramp on this side is partially open to the public, with a large sculpture hanging in the middle of the spiral ramp. It's too bad there wasn't a sign saying what this was -- it reminds me of Chihuly's glass art pieces (which are a big deal in my area), but it's instead made up of a whole bunch of little pieces of some material (ceramic? glass? metal? not sure). 

Time to head out. I hadn't bought a ticket to the inside museum, but on my way to the elevator I snuck a picture of the wooden Fiat they had on display. 

 

I'm not really sure how this movie theater was able to fit into this unusual building, but here it is with its 90s yellow-and-blue design. From Google Maps pictures, it looks like the theaters are a couple levels down from here, down in the basement. 

At the north end, the exit ramp is now enclosed within the building (unlike the southern one), and can be used as a (rather impractical, due to its extremely shallow slope) way to get between the mall's levels.

 And that's it for Lingotto. I've already showed you Eataly, which is just behind where I was standing. 

The next morning, all three of us went to the Egyptian Museum, which my mom and I had been wanting to visit for a long time. I thought I would have taken at least a picture of it for blog continuity purposes, but apparently not! Apparently I really don't take a lot of pictures when my parents are around -- all of my Turin pictures are from when I went out on my own. 

In the afternoon, they had a tour of Turin's historic Mole Antonelliana tower, which I wasn't all that interested in. So I bought a day pass for the trams, with the goal of heading out to the historic Sassi-Superga rack railway. That runs just once an hour (and shuts down fairly early in the evening), so initially I wanted to take a bus straight out there, but missed that due to complications with their ticket machines. 

No problem, I figured I'd just kill some time and ride the less direct tram route out there. 

 

I even managed to get all three of Turin's current tram models on the way out there -- things are looking great! 

Uh, not so fast. Once I finally got on the tram that would actually take me out to the rack railway, we went a few blocks and then came to a complete stop in the middle of the street, and I could see other trams stopped up and down the block. After what felt like quite a while (with absolutely no communication from the driver), some of the locals managed to talk him into letting us out (again, into the middle of the street). 

 

At this point I decided the universe just didn't want me to head out to the rack railway (I was going to miss another train thanks to the delays, so if everything else managed to go completely right, I would maybe have made it to the very last train of the day -- and that's assuming they bothered to follow the online schedule, which you can never count on in Italy). So I hung out and watched the chaos as trams continued to build up, blocking each other's path. 

The whole time I was eyeing this vintage train parked off to the side. I haven't been able to tell for sure if they are still in regular service or only used for historic tram service (which only runs on the weekends, not when I was there), but here one was with its doors open and a route on its sign. However, it wasn't parked at a regular stop and there was no driver in sight. I stuck around here for at least half an hour to see if anything would happen, but no one ever showed up, so I'm not sure what was going on. Maybe it was supposed to go into service for the afternoon peak but ended up sitting around thanks to whatever disruption was happening. 

Eventually the trams started running again, and I decided to hop on one down to the big park along the river, where I got a nice walk in while waiting for my parents to come back from the tower (in the background of the last picture). 

And at the end of that walk was the most out there insane road sign I may have ever seen! Even on foot it's hard to parse... imagine trying to get any useful information out of that when driving. Heck, looking back at this picture, it took me a while to even figure out where the "you are here" dot is on the map! (It's the bottom side of the second bridge on the right.)