As the days grow warmer, I’ll see old people wandering the hillside fields near my house gathering dandelion greens to eat boiled or in salads. This is also asparagus season, a moment of glory for Santena, a nearby agricultural town, where the restaurant Andrea serves a five-course all-asparagus menu, from antipasto to ice cream. With Easter, competing chocolatiers make their window displays as ornate as possible. And May and June bring the fabled cherries of Pecetto, a tiny suburb of Turin. On weekend afternoons, the roadsides are lined with farmers with sun umbrellas and baskets of dark red, pink, and yellow cherries.
It is in fall and winter, however, that Turin really comes into its own culinarily. One of the world’s greatest gastronomic fairs, the Slow Food convention, takes place in Turin every other autumn. Piedmont’s noble red wines, such as Barolo, are, of course, legendary and marry perfectly with another regional specialty, white truffles, which have their epicenter in the medieval town of Alba. During truffle season, my brother-in-law, Valerio, a large, genial man famed as a gourmet and as an epic host, haunts the foggy streets of the truffle fair at Alba, where scouts for famous restaurants all over Italy haggle with tight-lipped Piedmontese hill farmers, their skeletal truffle-hunting hounds by their sides. Valerio, of course, has his own private network, and before giving one of his Rabelaisian dinner parties will disappear into the backcountry for entire afternoons, emerging with truffles the size of a child’s fist.
Every day we gather grapes, walnuts, crisp Martin Sec pears, and the large, flavorful Tonda Gentile hazelnuts that give gianduia its classic buttery texture. My children and I go for rambles in the woods near our house, searching for chestnuts, which we retrieve in the proper fashion by stamping on their prickly hulls and then fishing them up gingerly with gloved hands.
As winter’s fog and rain draw near, it is time to investigate the interior life of the city, which, as in many outwardly conservative places, is peculiarly intense and a little kinky. Any Italian teenager will tell you that Turin is known for a very wild, very late-night, and very druggy club scene, centered on the notorious riverside zone called i murazzi. But there are more esoteric mysteries: Famous for one of the world’s great enigmas, the Holy Shroud, Turin has a dark metaphysical soul like no other Italian city’s. Not by chance did it give birth to tragic geniuses like Primo Levi and Cesare Pavese, as well as the romantic adventure writer Emilio Salgari—whose exotic Far Eastern landscapes linger in the imagination like opium dreams.
Beyond this, Turin has traditionally been known as a center of witchcraft, forming one corner of a “triangle of magic,” with the cities of Lyon and Prague. It is a reputation so accepted that there are actually black magic tours of the city that take place, naturally, at night, recounting innumerable goings-on with a whiff of brimstone, from the pagan rites of the original Celtic tribes through medieval alchemists to devil-worshipping artists.
In the winter I like to reacquaint myself with the Egyptian Museum, a 17th-century palazzo filled with the largest collection of Egyptian art outside Cairo, plundered by Napoleon’s troops. (One urban legend has it that Turin lies under a curse because of a lost canopic jar holding a pharaoh’s heart; another is that the secret ingredient in the highly classified formulas of famous Piedmontese vermouth makers is powdered mummy.) Then there is the faded grandeur of the Savoy royal palaces in the city center, as well as Stupinigi, the extravagant royal hunting lodge; and the shock of postmodern fantasy that is the Cinema Museum, set in the base of the Mole Antonelliana. One of my favorite museums is the Castello di Rivoli, a 17th-century Savoy castle partially destroyed during World War II and rebuilt into a sumptuous patchwork of antique brick and modern glass that has become a venue for contemporary exhibitions. Another is the Palazzo Bricherasio, a Baroque gem set in the center of town that hosts quirky international shows, from Fauvists to Tibetan Buddhist art.
With the first snows, the streets of Turin are deserted on weekends as everyone heads for the ski slopes. In fact, the Alpine Club of Italy was founded here in 1863. The Turinese adore Sestriere, one of the sites of the 2006 Winter Olympics, a resort with magnificent runs but a notable lack of period charm. I prefer Gressoney, in the Valle D’Aosta region, with huge pines, unspoiled villages, and a fin de siècle castle where the Savoy family once vacationed. Here, after a morning of skiing, we settle down in the sun at an outdoor table of an inn called La Genzianella and devour steaming bowls of polenta concia—stone-ground yellow cornmeal mush mixed with mountain butter and local Toma cheese.
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