The first time I visited Turin, 16 years ago, I understood that it was a Sunday dinner kind of town. Back then I was just passing through, a fledgling journalist on my way to interview Sophia Loren, who was on location in the mountains of nearby Courmayeur. I had no idea that I would marry a Turinese and make the city my home. I felt a curious frisson of recognition, though, when I took a walk through the center of the city, wandering down boulevards lined with elegant shops under covered arcades, through spacious piazzas in neighborhoods whose architecture ranged from Baroque to Art Nouveau. It was late on a Sunday morning, and from the palace of the dukes of Savoy in the Piazza Castello to the Mole Antonelliana, the massive 19th-century steel and glass spire that is Turin’s Eiffel Tower, I saw bourgeois families strolling after Mass. Fathers in handsome loden coats, mothers in fur, children in shetland jackets with velvet collars, old women in the beautifully cut tweed and cashmere outfits that make northern Italian grandmothers the most elegant in the world. Carrying newspapers and chivying manicured dogs, they clustered around cafés and confectioners, drinking cappuccino, greeting friends, and emerging with elaborately wrapped packages of pastries. Everyone was on their way to one of those monumental Sunday noon meals that cement family ties with ritual foods that speak of solidity, tradition, prosperity. I could picture the dining rooms with the patina of age, the heavy furniture, the old pictures, the bored children, the white-haired aunts with their small talk, and I could almost smell the food: roasts and soups and some kind of soporific starch—pasta or risotto or polenta—designed for facilitating postprandial naps.
Turin, set in the foothills of the Alps in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy, is an ancient city that has undergone many transformations in its 2,000-year history: from Celtic settlement to Roman colony to capital of the ducal state of Savoy and first royal capital of Italy, to postwar industrial center of Italy, as closely identified with Fiat and Olivetti as Detroit is with Ford and General Motors. Turin was the cradle of Italian independence: It was the political center of the Risorgimento, the movement for political unification that in 1861 forged the territories of the Italian peninsula into a single modern state. Turin is a city perfumed with a wistful longing for the gracious pace and aristocratic grandeur of earlier days. Above all, it is a city defined by social attachments, by neighborhoods, by families.
Some years later, my first formal visit to Turin was, appropriately enough, on a weekend. By that time, I’d heard unflattering descriptions of the city—which is not much loved by other Italians—from friends in Rome and Milan. I’d been warned about the industrial pollution, about the fabled snobbery of the inhabitants, about the uneasy coexistence of the factory workers—whose families were transplanted from southern Italy after World War II—and the middle-class northerners who run the economy. However, I was captivated immediately, especially when my fiancé brought me to Sunday lunch at his brother’s villa in the hills. On our way, we stopped at a pasticceria—confectionary shop—decorated with dim, ecclesiastical mahogany and marble to pick up a package of hors d’oeuvres called salatini. Turin’s French heritage—it is about an hour from the French border and was for centuries the capital of the Duchy of Savoy—is evident in these canapés, which range from pastry shells filled with quail egg and caviar to ruffles of foie gras and shrimp to miniature pastry mushrooms stuffed with savory mousse.
Though I didn’t know it then, the pasticceria was the legendary Peyrano Pfatisch, a century-old institution renowned in Turin. Peyrano is famous for its chocolate and, along with other master confectioners like Gerla and Calcagno, forms part of a tradition that has made Turin famous throughout Europe since the days when the city’s chocolatiers vied for the custom of the Savoy court and the Swiss came to Turin to learn the art of roasting and preparing cocoa beans. I only saw that the place was packed with well-dressed customers buying ornately constructed cakes and pastries and bulging packages of gianduiotti—the unctuous chocolate hazelnut creams originally crafted in Piedmont. They were waited on by solemn ladies in white caps and aprons, who seemed to know all the clients by name. “Buongiorno, Signor B … Buona domenica, Signora A …” I realized that I had entered the Sunday ritual I’d glimpsed so many years before.
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