Turin & the Alps - Italy - page 437

The museum's first section tracks the development of moving pictures from
shadow puppets to kinescopes. The rest is more a tribute to film than a true
museum, offering clips and stills to illustrate some of the major aspects of movie
production, from The Empire Strikes Back storyboards to the creepy steady-cam
work in The Shining. Of memorabilia, masks from Planet of the Apes, Satyricon,
and Star Wars hang together near Lawrence of Arabia 's robe, Chaplin's bowler, and
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 's dress. Curiously, most of the clips (all in
Italian dubbed versions), as well as posters and other memorabilia, are heavily
weighted toward American movies, with exceptions mainly for the major players
of European/international cinema like Fellini, Bertolucci, Truffaut, and Wim
Wenders.
Even if you skip the museum, you can ride the dramatic glass elevator ( € 3.60
for the ride) to an observation platform at the top of the spire, an experience that
affords two advantages: The view of Turin and the surrounding countryside,
backed by the Alps, is stunning; and, as Guy de Maupassant once said of the Eiffel
Tower, it's the only place in Turin where you won't have to look at the damned
thing.
THE OTHER TURIN
To understand Italy—or at the very least to learn the stories behind Cavour,
Garibaldi, Mazzini, Vittorio Emanuele II, Massimo d'Azeglio, and the people
after whom most of the major streets and piazze in Italy are named—you need to
brush up on the Risorgimento, the late-19th-century movement that launched
Italian unification. While any self-respecting town in Italy has a museum dedi-
cated to it, Turin's Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento (Via Accademia delle
Scienze, 5; % 011-5621147; www.regione.piemonte.it/cultura/risorgimento; € 5;
Tues-Sun 9am-7pm) is the best of the bunch. After all, much of the history of
Italy's unification played out in this Turin palazzo, which was home to unified
Italy's first king, Vittorio Emanuele II, and later became, in 1861, the seat of its
first parliament. Documents, paintings, and other paraphernalia recount the
heady days when Vittorio Emanuele II banded with General Garibaldi and his
Red Shirts to oust the Bourbons from Sicily and the Austrians from the north to
create a unified Italy. The plaques describing the contents of each room are in
English, and the last rooms house a fascinating collection that chronicles Italian
fascism and the resistance against it, which evolved into the Partisan movement
during World War II.
As befits a city responsible for 80% of Italian car manufacturing, the Museo
dell Automobile ( Automobile Museum; Corso Unita d'Italia, 40; % 011-677666;
www.museoauto.it; € 5.50; Tues-Sun 10am-6:30pm) is a shiny collection of most
of the cars that have done Italy proud over the years, including Lancias, Isotta
Frashinis, and the Itala that came in first in the 1907 Peking-to-Paris rally. Among
the oddities is a roadster emblazoned with the initials ND , which Gloria Swanson
drove in her role as faded movie queen Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. The
museum lies well south of the center; take bus no. 34 or 35, or tram no. 1 or 18.
But that's just a museum displaying a century's worth of Fiats. To really get
behind the scenes, get a glimpse of industrial Turin at its best on the 3-hour
Turismo Industriale tour (run by the tourist office; € 5; Mar-Dec 2, 4 times a
month). On a rotating schedule, this bus tour visits one of Turin's top industrial