ferrero rocher

Did you know they come from Torino? As do Nutella, Tic Tacs and Vermouth, while the world's highest quality mint is grown in nearby Pancalfieri. Torino is also the 2008 Design Capital of the world and was the capital city of Italy in the early days of unification.

With the river Po cutting through her centre like a winding blue ribbon, Torino is stunning. Art sculptures mix with ancient palaces and huge paved squares lined with decorative white buildings, with a wide open sky and a refreshing feeling of space. For once, the churches aren't the main attraction touted by locals. Because the city's expansion was planned and therefore designed, the streets follow a sensible pattern, drawing the visitor into the centre of town along the wide and welcoming porticoed walkways of Via Roma. There are fountains, large piazzas and expansive public gardens. (One of the items on the ever increasing list of claims to fame is that Torino is Italy's greenest city.)

Visitors are made extremely welcome in this town. There is a Torino card which you can buy for your chosen period of days, from 1 to 7. The card grants you free access to all of the public transport in the city and every single museum in the whole region of Piedmont. There are no limits and it only costs 20 euros for 3 days. Needless to say, I had saved up my museum visitation urges for coming here. My feet still ache when I think of it, but I spent three consecutive days covering just about every type of museum there is.

I wandered through the Palazzo Valentino and its riverside gardens, a typewriter museum (boring but I didn't know what it was until I was through the door), an automobile museum where I was the only woman with lots of car freak men, the Mole Antonella and the giant cinema museum inside (cinema was invented in Torino), the Egyption Museum (biggest one outside of Egypt, with real unwrapped mummies, tombs that were dismantled and reconstructed inside the museum, and many other amazing artefacts).

There was a photography exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Eataly (local food and wine), a trip on a 1930s tram uphill to the Basilica Superga with an amazing view of Torino and a tour in Italian of various tombs of past Italian kings. I held my breath walking within centimetres of ancient paintings and other pieces in the Palazzo Madama. There were textiles, baroque and renaissance paintings including Antonello da Messina's "Portrait of a Man", Anguissola's "Chess Game" and even works by Caravaggio. (Incidentally the town I'm in now has paintings by Molineri, just sitting there in one of the churches.) I also had a personal guided tour in Italian of the many rooms of the Decorative Arts Museum, a palace furnished in the style of the height of Torinese decadance. Winding down, I dropped into an exhibition of Japanese Terracotta warriors (incidentally "terra cotta" translates to "earth cooked") and a few other smaller exhibitions. Feeling puffed? After those three days I spent a whole day in the park reading a book.

I really enjoyed my time in Torino, it was the perfect mix of socialising, museum hopping, wandering, eating and relaxing. Unfortunately the open, clean, modern feel of the city will be left mostly to your imagination; I took very few photos. Torino's beauty is in her history, her modern flourishes, her willingness to embrace visitors, and the soft, contented hum of the crowds wandering through her piazzas.