There are worse things you could be doing than spending a weekend in elegant Turin, writes Seth Sherwood With the Alps as a background, Turin, Italy’s fourth-largest city , is elegant, photogenic and rich with history. Grand squares and former royal palaces abound in this northern Italian crossroads, nicknamed Little Paris, which was briefly Italy’s first capital after the country’s unification in 1861. And despite housing one of Christianity’s most solemn relics — a shroud believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus — the city is awash in earthly pleasures.
Both gianduja chocolate and vermouth were invented there, and can be sampled among the historic coffee houses , chocolate shops and aperitivo bars that line the city’s arcaded shopping boulevards. And especially important in the winter, an ever-expanding buffet of galleries and museums — including one of the world’s largest collections of Egyptian antiquities, a museum of fake fruit and a new contemporary art hub on a rooftop racetrack — offer respite from the cold and food for the spirit. READ MORE: Turin: Italy’s elegant Cinderella ITINERARY Friday 6pm | Hike to a hilltop church If climbing an actual mountain seems daunting, the 15-minute hike up to the Monte dei Cappuccini, a hilltop with a 17th-century church on top, will at least give you great mountain views.
To the west, the grid of Turin’s streets of Baroque buildings and bell towers stretches for kilometres, punctuated by the spire an.
