Turin

The Taurini, a Celto-Ligurian people, gave the city its name. In the 1st century BC the Romans founded Augusta Taurinorum, a walled colony on a grid plan whose outline still shapes the Quadrilatero, and the Porta Palatina survives from its walls. After Rome it passed to the Ostrogoths, the Lombards and the Franks, and through the marriage of Adelaide of Susa it came under the House of Savoy. By the end of the 13th century, when it was annexed to the Savoy state, it had about 20,000 inhabitants, and the University of Turin was founded in the 15th century.

Turin's great age began in 1563, when Duke Emmanuel Philibert made it his capital. The Savoys enlarged it in planned stages — Piazza San Carlo and Via Roma, the Royal Palace, the arcaded Via Po — and in 1706 the city withstood a French siege of 117 days. The dukes became kings, and in the 19th century, as capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Turin led the unification of Italy, becoming the first capital of the new kingdom in 1861 until the move to Florence in 1865.

Industry replaced the court. Fiat was founded here in 1899 and Lancia in 1906, and the 1902 exposition made the city a showcase of Art Nouveau. Allied bombing in the Second World War heavily damaged the city, and partisans freed the city in April 1945. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from the south arrived during the post-war boom, and the population peaked at almost 1.2 million in 1971 before the crises of the 1970s and 1980s cut it by more than a quarter. The 2006 Winter Olympics marked a city remaking itself.

Turin wears its royal past openly: the Savoy residences in and around the city form a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the palaces, squares and arcades of the centre give it a formal, orderly feel unusual in Italy. It is also a city of museums, from the Egyptian Museum to the cinema museum in the Mole, and UNESCO has named it a City of Design. Literature runs deep — the publisher Giulio Einaudi brought out Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg — and in the 1960s and 1970s the city was a centre of Arte Povera.

Music has its stage at the Teatro Regio, where Puccini's La bohème was first performed in 1896, and newer scenes gather around techno festivals in summer. Football divides households between Juventus and Torino, whose rivalry is the Derby della Mole. The Shroud of Turin, kept in the cathedral, makes the city a destination for pilgrims on the rare occasions it is shown.

Café culture is a point of civic pride: the arcades of Piazza San Carlo hold the city's oldest cafés, Caffè Fiorio on Via Po was the favourite café of 19th-century politicians, and the evening aperitivo, linked to the vermouth first produced in Turin in the 18th century, remains a daily ritual.

About 856,000 people lived in the city proper in 2026, the urban area holds about 1.7 million, and the wider metropolitan area about 2.2 million. Immigrants made up 18.7 per cent of the population in 2025, with large communities in districts such as Borgo Dora and San Salvario, and the city's population has long been shaped by migration from southern Italy.

The car industry is still a pillar — Fiat, now part of Stellantis, keeps a sizeable factory here, and design houses and suppliers surround it — but the economy has broadened. Aerospace firms built modules of the International Space Station in Turin, the University of Turin and the Polytechnic draw large numbers of students, and banking, food companies such as Ferrero, Lavazza and Martini & Rossi, and tourism add to the mix.

Daily rhythms run on coffee at the bar, a working lunch and an evening aperitivo, with the riverside and Parco del Valentino filling on warm evenings. Many families leave for the sea or the mountains in August. A second metro line, linking Mirafiori in the south-west with Barriera di Milano in the north, is planned.

Turin is above all a chocolate city. Gianduiotto, the ingot-shaped chocolate made with hazelnuts, is named after Gianduja, a local commedia dell'arte mask, and gianduja itself is the hazelnut chocolate the city is known for. The bicerin is the signature drink: espresso, drinking chocolate and whole milk served in layers in a small rounded glass. Torrone, nougat, and grissini, thin breadsticks, are among the city's traditional products, and tramezzini, the crustless sandwiches found in bars across Italy, were first served at Caffè Mulassano in 1925.

The wider Piedmontese table is rich and meaty: vitello tonnato, thinly sliced cold veal under a creamy tuna sauce; agnolotti del plin, small pinched stuffed pasta; tajarin, thin egg pasta; and bollito misto, mixed boiled meats with green sauce. Turin also has its own pizza al padellino, a small, thick-crust, deep-dish pizza served in many of the city's pizzerias.

The modern versions of vermouth were first produced in Turin in the 18th century, and it is still served as an aperitif. Porta Palazzo, the great open market on Piazza della Repubblica, hosts the biggest open market in Europe, and the Eataly food hall near Lingotto began here before spreading worldwide.