Conzano to Torino (Turin)

Friday 19th June 2026

Early start, well for us anyway considering we are on holidays. Time to farewell Conzano and move onto Turin. We drove the hire car back to Alessandria and caught the train to Torino. We did not have to but we wheeled our backpack/suitcases for 30 minutes between the car drop off and the train station. So far our experiences with trains, time tables and stations have been good. There is a mobile app to remind us of our bookings and if the train is more than a few minutes early or late we get a notice. The station are clean with clear signage and screens showing the platform where our train will arrive. We have been on a range of business class, enjoying complimentary snacks, as well as regional trains that are modern and spacious.

Arriving in Torino we legged it again for about half an hour to our apartment in via Giuseppe Garibaldi. The accommodation style is just a bit different from other places. It’s located within a 5 level concrete and brick building entered through large wooden doors. The entrance way opens out onto an internal courtyard. Our second doorway, requires another key to enter our section of the building. Fortunately there is a lift as we are on the third floor. There are several apartments on this level, so through another door (3rd key) and into the apartment. Within the apartment there are 2 doors, the second door requires the 4th key and we are into our spacious 2 room accommodation.

 

 

 

 

Torino is incredible – the buildings at every turn are just stunning. Consistently they are all 5 levels, usually all perfectly aligned and most have small decorative balconies. The Piemonte region must have had considerable wealth centuries ago to have this amazing architectural legacy that remains today.  The gap between the wealthy aristocracy and the peasant farmers would have been extreme. From my research and subsequent assumptions about my own family, who were peasant farmers (contadini) I now understand why they left Conzano to migrate to the other side of the world. In Conzano they could never own land and had to pay the wealthy land owners a portion of the return on their crops every season. Within 2 years of arriving in Australia my grandfather was an Australian citizen and during the next 15 years had saved sufficient funds to buy the family sugar cane farm in Aloomba, while my grandmother was raising 4 children. Enough of the family history lesson and back to Torino.

There is so much to explore and we have the next 4 days. One of the things I had never expected to find and even less likely to do was spend an afternoon at the Museo Egizio (Egyptian Museum). However strange as it may seem this museum has a connection to Conzano through one of the locals, Count Carlo Vidua. (1788-1824). Most likely his family would have been the wealthy land owners that my forebears rented their farming land from. One thing for sure, Count Carlo certainly had itchy feet and spent most of his life exploring the world (see separate post, yet to be published). His first journey of more than 3 years commencing in 1818  took him to Egypt. He spent months there exploring the country and recording archaeological finds. It was here he met fellow countryman, the Egyptologist and Diplomat Bernardino Drovetti of Torino. Drovetti had already amassed a huge collection of Egyptian artifacts and Count Carlo was rightly concerned that if this collection was not purchased and sent to Italy it would end up in a museum in Paris or Russia. His campaigning was eventually successful and the collection was purchased for 400,000 Italian lire in 1824 and is now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Torino. This collection sparked keen interest in Egyptology and further Torinese scholars continued on archeological digs amassing a collection that for a long time was the largest on it’s kind in the world. Even today the only other collection that surpasses this museum is the museum in Cairo. The sheer size of this collection is overwhelming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After more than 3 hours it was seriously time for an aperitivo or aperitif. In other words, a drink. Beer for Geoff and a Hugo Spritz for me. We carried on further down the street and decided on pizza for dinner tonight.  After all it is Friday and that’s been a tradition in our household for decades – home made of course, including the dough. But this was Pizza in the Piazza, and there are a lot of Piazzas in Turin, especially the big ones. It has been hot and we soon learnt not to walk across more than a 100 metres of roasting concrete or marble. Like the locals we hugged the shade of the colonnades and porticoes. The sun does not go down till around 9:30pm so there was the opportunity to discover more of this remarkable city as we returned to our apartment and wrestled with the locks.