Sample text from Autumn in Piemonte. Torino ~ The Royal City.
Modern Torino is a city of 900,000 people with an industrial periphery housing another 400,000. The suburbs in the periphery have been built mainly to service the factories of the Fiat group and its suppliers. But the heart of Torino is a well preserved Baroque city, a northern city, whose days of fame were its time as the capital Dukedom of Savoy and the Kingdom of Sardinia.
Unlike many Italian cities, churches don’t have a pride of place here. This is a city of kings, not cardinals. Torino is above all a Royal city. You can see the signs everywhere; in the martial statues of dukes and kings, the streetlamps topped with crowns, but mostly in the unity and scale of the Baroque centre’s layout. Somebody was laying down the rules! In this case it was the Royal family who dictated the style of the rather severe classical facades.
They also apparently influenced who would live in the Palazzo behind the facades - the closer to the Royal Palace, the higher the favour being shown. Behind the palazzi facades the outer severity of style did not apply, as the nobles of the day vied to outdo each other in commissioning guilded interiors... Piemonte.
