Turin is the unknown jewel of Italy, its baroque grandeur offset by a wild mountain backdrop. But unravelling this enigmatic city is the key to understanding the nation it founded. Briefly Italy’s first capital during the Risorgimento, twentieth-century Turin discovered a new destiny as the engine of its industrialisation. In the process it became the hub of both Italian capitalism and labour and, in turn, a centre of resistance to fascism. During the post-war years the city drove parallel revivals, Fiat powering Italy’s ‘economic miracle’ and the iconic publishing house Einaudi nourishing an extraordinary flowering of literary talent. Its polarities are elaborated even by its rival football teams: the seigneurial Juventus and Torino, the fallen giants. In McGrath’s Turin, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, and Natalia Ginzburg tread arcaded streets alongside lesser-known witnesses – from the forgotten nineteenth-century poet who best preserves the city’s definitively crepuscular atmosphere to the partisan footballer turned star of neorealist cinema. Risorgimento, resistance, reconstruction: without Turin, the evolution of modern Italy would never have been the same.
