I could not sleep, so I did the thing I always do and went out into the dark to beat the city awake. By the time the sky started going I was standing in front of these two great brick towers, glowing like they were lit from inside. This is the Porta Palatina, a Roman gate, near enough two thousand years old. Turin started life as Augusta Taurinorum, a Roman camp laid out on a grid, and this gate is where you walked in from the north. It is one of the best-kept Roman gates left anywhere. At six in the morning, with nobody about, it just sits there, enormous and old and completely unbothered by me.
From the Roman bones of the place I wandered down into the Savoy part, the grand square by the Royal Palace, where the light was going gold on everything. A bronze horseman rears up at the palace gates, reined back hard on his hind legs, and behind him a dome was catching the first sun like it had been polished for the occasion. That is San Lorenzo, and the dome is the clever bit, built by Guarino Guarini between 1668 and 1687, all intersecting stone arches crossing over each other into an eight-pointed star. A puzzle box that happens to keep the rain off.
By now I had to go and stand under it properly. The Mole Antonelliana, close up, is even dafter than it looks from a distance. Antonelli started it in 1863 as a synagogue for the city’s Jewish community, then kept adding to it, pushing it up and up until it hit a hundred and sixty-seven metres, the tallest brick building in the world. The community handed it over in the end and now it is the national cinema museum. It leans over you like a stone rocket somebody forgot to launch. I love it.
Down the long arcaded run of Via Po I found the thing I had actually come out for. A big bronze head, all broken up and pixelated, mouth wide open like it was mid-shout, hands coming up around it. No smooth skin, no polish, just this rough stuttering mass that somehow read completely as a face caught in the middle of a sound. That is the whole hunt for me on this trip. How little you can leave in and still have the movement land. I stood in the empty street with it for a while, thinking in black lines.
The street ran me down to the river. The Po was flat and quiet, holding the old stone bridge upside down on its surface, arches and all, with the green hills of the far bank stacked up behind. I have watched water do this all trip, in Venice and on the lake, and here it was again, a whole second Turin wobbling gently under the real one. At half six, with the place to myself, I took far too many photos of a bridge doing nothing.
And then, my favourite thing in the whole city, and it is not a palace. On a corner by the gate there is a little green cast-iron fountain with a bull’s head, water pouring out of its mouth in a steady silver rope, and a committee of pigeons taking their morning bath underneath. These are called toret, little bulls, and there are around eight hundred of them dotted round Turin. The bull is the city’s own sign, Toro, Torino, it is right there in the name. Free cold water and a bird bath. Perfect.
The sun was properly up by the time I got into the porticoes, and this is where Turin really is my kind of town. Miles of covered arcade, and the floors laid out in black and white marble, patterns running away from you down the colonnade into the light. A woman crossed the far end with a little dog trotting beside her, two small dark shapes in all that geometry. I stood in the shade grinning. A whole city that thinks in black and white lines. I could work here.
On the way back I did the working part, nose against gallery glass. One antique shop had a whole crowd of white plaster busts stacked in the window, classical heads and cherubs and cameos, the street reflected over the top of them. And all over town the same posters, a big retrospective of the Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert on at CAMERA, the photography place here. A man who spent his life proving colour could carry a picture on its own. Funny thing to keep passing, when I go everywhere seeing the world in ink. Turin has given me a lot to chew on, and I have not even opened the sketchbook yet. More soon.
A morning behind the Royal Palace with the squirrels and a marble head wearing a pigeon, then down to Piazza San Carlo, where half the galleries were shut for August and one show stopped me dead.
Six days of Venice water and then the train sets you down in Turin, where the whole world suddenly goes straight. A first evening in the old Savoy capital, one bronze count, a dark dome, and a very good dog.
My last Venice morning, and the famous rooftop everyone climbs for the view has been shut for a year. No matter. I had the Rialto at dawn, an empty St Mark’s, and then the rain turned every lane into a mirror.
