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Turin’s past, the baroque splendour of its royal architecture and its stately Parisian hauteur, was defined by the dukes of Savoy, but the city’s 20th century was defined by a different, more modern aristocracy, the Agnelli Dynasty, founders of the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino – FIAT. At the end of the 19th century it was the Agnellis that ensured Turin, divested of the mantle of Italy’s capital, maintained a major role in the newly founded country, reinventing itself as an industrial powerhouse at the apex of the so-called industrial triangle with Milan and Genoa. Turin’s industrial importance shaped much of what the city was to become. In promoting the car, Turin – the engine, literally, of Italy – celebrated the very values that were central to the artists and architects of the early 20th century avant-garde movements being theorized further afield in Paris: the new, the fast and the marriage of design with function. The grand city of arcades and palazzi had to expand and adapt to its new vocation and some of the buildings that sprung up in those early decades, such as the Lingotto factory, praised by Filippo Marinetti, founder of Futurism, as a masterpiece, are not merely the simple industrial spaces they appear but important pieces of a modernist architectural legacy. Turin was the first Italian city to import modernist influences into the country and, due to its proximity and historic openness to French influence, it was the city that imported many of the vogues, fashions and movements that had their origin in the French capital: art nouveau architecture, Parisian fashion and cinema. As with many industrial cities worldwide, Turin is regenerating and reinventing its disused factories and warehouses. And, as elsewhere, these unusual spaces have found favour with the local artistic community, giving rise to a particularly fertile contemporary arts scene. It has become an important and prevalent feature of the cityscape, as the Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM) and plethora of city art galleries bear testimony. Turin is the birthplace of Italian cinema, and to this day, far away from the studio world of Rome’s Cinecitta and the glamour of the Venice festival, the city’s yearly young film makers festival presides over the discovery and nurturing of the latest and brightest national and international talent. Turin was also the birthplace of Italian state radio and television network RAI, and also of Italian aviation. The city is currently the site of the biggest aeronautical and space factory design bureau in the country. So while various mantles have passed on to other more lauded cities, Turin should be remembered as a city of firsts. Industry, and specifically mass car production, needed serious manpower and created thousands of jobs. In the 1950s and 1960s the promise of a job and northern riches attracted a mass immigration to Turin from Italy’s south, an invited workforce similar to Germany’s Turkish gastarbeiter even in so far as Italy’s southerners are often viewed by those in the north as coming from another (poorer) country. Decades later immigration from southern Italy was followed by immigration from northern Africa. It has been a continual process that has changed the face of Turin, at once creating the medium-rise suburban sprawl to the north and south but also transforming the genetic and cultural make-up of its population in a modern expression of the city’s historic openness to outside and foreign influence. Unusual among Italian metropoles, Turin is both multicultural and racially integrated, and its cultural and in particular music scene has profited from this welcoming attitude. As the clubs of the Murazzi under the arches by the river Po testify, Turin is a hive of African-based rhythms, producing local bands such as Mau Mau, Africa United and Subsonica that have become international success stories with their own unique brand of Italian roots reggae and break beats. In these clubs you will find a subversive culture that is not what you might expect of modern Italian youth. It turns out to be the norm in Turin. For Turin is not, like Milan or Florence, an expression of the flash beautiful-on-the-outside designer Italy that has become the national stereotype, parading around in sunglasses, Armani suits and Gucci loafers. Turin is more a leather jacket: a raw, scruffy and slightly hippy city that has its roots firmly in an honest, worker mentality. These are the children of a strong anti-capitalist heritage. Just as in Turin’s 19th-century cafés the idea of an Italian constitution was spawned devolving governmental power from the monarch, so in the early 20th-century Turin, the Italian Trade Union movement was formed on the FIAT factory floors and with it, under the leadership of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Contemporary Italian politics may be totally dominated by the Milanese ex-crooner, Berlusconi and the PCI struggling for an identity as credible opposition but Turin as a city has always represented the opposite pole. Until his recent death, the much- loved Gianni Agnelli, President of Fiat, nicknamed l’Avvocato (the lawyer), was the sole national figurehead of this opposition. He represented honest blue-collar sweat versus il Seduttore’s white- collar sleaze and spin; historic Juventus against the nouveau riche of AC Milan; his newspaper La Stampa a critical independent voice. Turin does not evoke traditional romantic visions of Italy. It has never sought the limelight and if anything has benefited from being eclipsed. It remains an unconventional city, different from and less superficial than much of Italy and as contemporary as London or Berlin. Now that truffles, Barolo wine and the 2006 Winter Olympic stage have alerted the tourist industry to her treasures, it may seem as if Turin has roused herself from a deep post-industrial hangover. Long before the 2006 Winter Olympic mantle was bestowed on her, she was already beginning to have fun and make the most of her strange collection of assets, all the time without losing her royal demeanour. Turin is still the car capital of Italy and, like a classic Pininfarina design, she has beautiful lines. And where in Birmingham or Detroit could you look up at the end of a long boulevard and set eyes on the distant white crown of the Alps?
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