Turin
— — baroque arcades, a chocolate city under snow.
Not only on a wall.
“Turin is the chocolate city. The Piedmontese invented gianduja in 1865 when Napoleon's cocoa blockade pushed them to stretch the bean with local hazelnut. The cafés along Via Po still serve bicerin: espresso, chocolate, cream, in that order, in a small glass. The Alps stand close to the north. The Mole Antonelliana rises above the rooftops. The Shroud rests, mostly unseen, in the cathedral.
Turin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Turin sits in north-west Italy at the foot of the Western Alps, where the Po river leaves the mountains for the Piedmont plain. The city was capital of the House of Savoy from 1563 and the first capital of unified Italy from 1861 to 1865. The historical centre is a grid of arcaded streets laid out under Vittorio Amedeo II in the early eighteenth century, more French than Italian in its geometry. The current population is about 850,000; the metropolitan area holds 2.2 million.
The Mole Antonelliana, begun in 1863 as a synagogue and finished as a civic monument in 1889, rises 167.5 metres and was the tallest brick building in the world at completion. It now houses the National Cinema Museum, with a glass lift that runs up the open central spire. The Palazzo Reale, the Palazzo Madama, and the Palazzo Carignano form a baroque royal sequence in the centre, all built by the Savoy court between 1646 and 1718. The arcaded streets total about 18 kilometres.
The Egyptian Museum on Via Accademia delle Scienze holds the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Cairo, with over 30,000 objects and roots in the 1824 Drovetti acquisition. The Shroud of Turin sits in a sealed reliquary in the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista; public viewings are rare, the last in 2025, the next not yet scheduled. The Lingotto, the old Fiat factory with its rooftop test track, was reopened in 1989 as a conference and retail complex on a Renzo Piano design.