"Do you know Turin?" asked
Nietzsche. "It is a city after
my own heart ? a princely residence
of the seventeenth century, which
has only one taste giving commands
to everything, the court and its
nobility. Aristocratic calm is
preserved in everything; there are
no nasty suburbs." Although
TURIN
's traffic-choked streets are no
longer calm, and its suburbs are as
dreary as any in Italy, the city
centre's gracious Baroque
thoroughfares, opulent palaces,
sumptuous churches and splendid
collections of Egyptian antiquities
and northern European paintings are
still there - a pleasant surprise to
those who might have been expecting
satanic factories and little else.
Turin's suburbs were built by a
new dynasty, Fiat (Fabbrica
Italiana di Automobili Torino),
whose owner, Gianni Agnelli, is
reckoned to be the most powerful man
in Italy. Although the only sign of
Agnelli's power appears to be the
number of Fiats that cram Turin's
streets (as they do those of every
other Italian city), it's worth
remembering that Fiat owns Alfa
Romeo, Lancia, Autobianchi and
Ferrari too, accounting for more
than sixty percent of the Italian
car market. But there are other,
more hidden branches of the Agnelli
empire. Stop for a Cinzano in one of
the city's many fin de siècle
cafés and you're drinking an
Agnelli vermouth; buy the La
Stampa or Corriere della Sera
newspapers and you're reading
newsprint produced by the Agnelli
family. Support the Juventus
football team and you're supporting
the Agnellis who own it; or go for a
Club Med skiing holiday at the
nearby resort of Sestriere and
you'll sleep in hotels built by
Agnelli's grandfather. Wielding such
power, Agnelli and friends are seen
as a political force in a country
where governments are relatively
transient. Foreign governments often
take more notice of Agnelli than
they do of Italy's elected leaders:
as Henry Kissinger once said, Gianni
Agnelli "is the permanent
establishment". Terrorists too
recognized where the roots of
Italian power lay: the Red Brigade
was founded on the factory floors of
Fiat, and Fiat executives were as
much targets as were politicians.
The City
of Turin
The grid street-plan of Turin's
Baroque centre makes it easy to find
your way about. Via Roma is the
central spine of the city, a grand
affair lined with designer shops and
ritzy cafés, although nowadays on
the grubby side. It is punctuated
by...
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