Yes, sometimes you really do want to live on the other side of the tracks. And especially when Italian architect Renzo Piano builds your digs, you don’t hesitate to move in—even if it is on the far side of the tracks.
Just over a decade ago, Piano designed the hotel that is now the DoubleTree by Hilton Turin Lingotto. In the annals of industrial history, Turin’s 1915 Lingotto building is legendary as the former Fiat factory, and remains a shrine to the automobile.
The hotel is not only next to, but mimics, the super-long, 800,000-square-foot Lingotto factory in the formerly industrial district of the same name. DoubleTree rooms are essentially built around a towering atrium, whose glass elevator shaft suggests the kind of lift that would have hauled equipment in the old factory days.
The same lofty design element extends to the rooms that are almost high enough for a giraffe to stand in, with the soaring floor-to-ceiling windows reiterating the factory floor heights as well. Guests are thus promised stunning views of local hills and the Northern Italian Alps. Shades placed outside move on cables depending on time of day and add a cool effect, in more than one sense.
The Lingotto factory now houses a mall and businesses. But its rooftop is still reached by the same spiraling ramps that used to bring cars up for test runs; it’s the same rooftop off of which Michael Caine soars in a Mini as he flees the cops in the 1969 caper movie “The Italian Job.”
Renzo Piano also designed additional touches to the Lingotto rooftop itself, including a glass dome meeting room known as the Bubble, as well as a helipad. Today, his Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marelli Agnelli art gallery up there shows twenty-five works in a permanent exhibit (free for hotel guests).
Gianni (as he was known) Agnelli was of course legendary for leading one of the great glamorous lives of the last century. The Agnelli collection’s eclectic mix of works range from Canaletto and Tiepolo to Matisse and Renoir (one of his two “La Baigneuse Blonde” pieces). A Gino Severini work represents Italian Futurism. A Modigliani “Nu Couché” was painted in 1917, the same year as the one of the same title that just sold at auction for $157 million.
The temporary exhibition ”Frank Lloyd Wright Between USA and Italy” has been mounted in collaboration with Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, and will be up until this July 1st.
Across the tracks in Lingotto, the DoubleTree faces the 226-foot-high Olympic Arch and a stadium which is now home to the Torino FC soccer team. Aficionados of Eataly can exit the DoubleTree doors and in a minute step into the the mega-successful empire’s very first venue, featuring the usual vast warehouse of tasty goods, five restaurants, and a little beer cove downstairs.
If the other side of the tracks still isn’t enough for you, no worries; with the city’s fine Metro system stopping right at Lingotto, you can be in the city center in no time.
And what a center it is. You know Turin for Fiat of course, and for vermouth and chocolate, and more recently for having hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics. You may not have known that the House of Savoy created a stunning center of Baroque and Neoclassical architectural riches, on streets that were laid out purposefully in grid pattern rather than in the usual style of Italy’s medieval warrens. Every block seems to be lined with mighty bourgeois residences with their emblematic piani nobili.
The city is known for having miles of some of the world’s finest shopping arcades, such as the upscale Via Roma, as well as for pedestrianized streets. Right in the town center, you might be surprised to discover one of the world’s great Egyptian Museums. The Museo Egizio was smartly redesigned a few years ago to better highlight its treasures, such as a renowned papyrus collection and the impressive Tomb of Kha that dates to 3,500 BC.
A few blocks up, the Palazzo Madama with its Renaissance paintings anchors a broad plaza, while behind it, the House of Savoy’s Royal Palace and gardens are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And the Shroud of Turin happens to be in the adjacent Cathedral.
Right on the Po River and just a few minutes from the DoubleTree, the National Automobile Museum‘s 1960s building was reclad in recent years with a sleek futuristic aluminum look. The collection includes an 1854 steam-powered coach.
It’s said that many Milanese are moving to Turin to get away from the bigger, more hectic city. It won’t take you long to realize why that might be the case. And whether you’re in Lingotto or Turin’s old town, expect envy to set in as you wander the entrancing streets.
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