Touring in Torino

As a working-class Detroiter who earned his Ph.D. tuition money in Ford, Chrysler and Fisher Body factories, I’ve always kept a special place in my heart for Turin. My first contact with that once-gritty industrial city occurred in Minneapolis at an American Studies convention in 1979, in the form of a Torinese by the name of Naila Clerici, who introduced herself as a specialist in American Indian studies at the University of Genoa.

Huh? Amerinds? University of Genoa? Was this some kind of insider academic joke I didn’t get?

No, the young Italian explained. Christopher Columbus came from Genoa. And we’re dead serious about investigating the long-term effects of his discoveries on the native populations— and, more importantly, what the “conquerors” must learn from the “conquered.” And vice versa. She has parlayed that first shrewd intuition more than 30 years ago into an internationally renowned quarterly with the beguilingly misspelled title "Tepee".

I still relish the memory of 1981, when I pit stopped at Fiat’s Lingotto factory for a conference on Soviet Russian modernism shortly after the Italian architect Renzo Piano had transformed that working place into the vibrant cultural center it now is. I took the last whirl around the roof race track.

It’s not easy to describe how transformed this complex has become. An entirely new hall for industrial fairs. A block long Gallery 8 on the second floor of the former factory, which is basically a shopping center with high-tech playgrounds to keep the pre-shopping-age kids from getting too bored while their elders shop. On the fourth floor, there’s the Giovanni and Marianna Agnelli Pinatothek (he founded Fiat), to display their superb collection as well as traveling shows like the one I saw of the Van Sack design collection. Van Sack is the founder and first director of the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, just north of Basel.

The newest attraction is EATALY, a pun on Eat in Italy, a Slow Food folly, where there are seven small restaurants specializing in some kind of Slow Food. I chose "fish", and although the swordfish I ordered was small enough to be dubbed a daggerfish, it was suckably succulent, with small boiled potatoes and a sauce of lemon slices cohabiting with capons. A Merlot from Venezia and slabs of grand white crusty bread (too fat to be called slices) completed my feisty feast, for a piddling 20 euros ($31).

By the way, the epigraph blessing all this Slow Food Malarkey is by my favorite Kentucky pastoralist, Wendell Berry: “Eating is an agricultural act.” Damned if it ain’t! I fell as well for a purple T-shirt (15 euros) emblazoned “NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING A PIG,” a sentiment I have long espoused without the benefit of any T-shirt philosophizing.

Naila booked me into the San Maurizio Pensione at 38 euros a night plus four more for a skimpy breakfast (optional). A superb location. (The address is Corso San Maurizio 31, fourth floor. Phone: 11 88 24 34, and ask for Massmiliano, the son who speaks the best English.) The River Po is a few blocks to the south. Out my broad back balcony I can see on a distant southeastern mountain the Sanctus Spiritus Church, where the Savoy royals are buried.

On the balcony facing the street is the best view in all Turin of the Mole Antoneliana, a 19th-Century high-rise folly that began as a synagogue (rejected in a Jewish huff before completion as too goofy!) but now housing the National Cinema Museum, the greatest such I have ever encountered, bar none. And I’ve seen them all! Suffice it to say that the quintessentially antsy Haz spent three solid hours gawking.

The biggest boon is the Number 18 bus, one block to the North—to your right on the Corso San Maurizios as you leave the pension. At the traffic light you cross the Corso. Past the garden on the right side of that cross street you’ll see the bus stop. Tickets in tobacco shops. If you’d turned right at the light, you’d soon find a friendly Nigerian running a little grocery store. He lets you use his phones for small change.

Back to the No. 18 bus. It passes innumerable, indispensable stops such as the art gallery of the Academia Albertina. Later on, the Jazz Club. Eventually you reach Lingotto— in a half hour. And at Corso Victorio Emmanuelle, if you take the 35 bus instead of the 18, you get to Porto Nuova, from which most European trains leave. Exception is the TGV to Paris, which you get at Porta Susa—one stop from Nuova by Metro. Around the corner from the Mole there’s a Torino Info center. Use it to start with.

Since Turin is the Design Capital of Europe this year, you’ll find free book-length introductions to newly placed infrastructure as well as a plethora of super experiences in Turin and throughout the Piedmont region during the entire year.

It was the 6,000 architects from the entire world holding their triennial congress that brought me there. (Tokyo is next in 2011.) It’s as close to heaven as this serial sinner expects to get.