Discover the city
Turin, a city that surprises with its myriad unexpected facets
Whatever the nature of your stay, the city can reveal unexpected depths. Because the capital of tradition, oligarchic dynasties, understatement and little gestures repeated down through the centuries is also the “laboratory city” that is capable of inventing and doing with surprising concreteness and ingenuity.
In this post-industrial city in full transition, the Winter Olympics were made possible only by a combination of Turin’s visionary spirit and its organisational talent. These same qualities have enabled its status as a centre of avant-garde boat building despite being landlocked, its burgeoning hydrogen industry in response to the new energy challenges, Italy’s most advanced system for furthering contemporary art, an extraordinary creative effervescence in the musical arena, and an audiovisual and film production centre capable of competing with the traditional international studios.
Modern-day Turin is a centre of development of the culture economy, the service economy, the hospitality economy. A process in which the Olympics, with the urbanistic and structural changes that it required, represent only a stage, the one that is easiest to see. And if today Turin can position itself as a “city of work” where a multiplicity of fields of expertise converge, at the same time it remains a city of taste and good taste, a “theatre city” with its refined baroque aesthetic, its convivial pleasures wrapped in an elegant sobriety, sparkling with the myriad shards of light from its precious crystals, mirrors, velvets, frescoes, the internal and natural scenery that embellish the whole.
Midnight on New Year’s Eve marks the start of the “2008: Torino World Design Capital”: 2008 will make Turin the centre of new architectures and world design. A calendar crowded with events, conferences, exhibitions and various expressions of design, held by ICSID, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, and organised together with ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale) and leading experts in the sector.