Turin

Turin, dear friend, is a capital discovery ... the first place where I am possible! —Friedrich Nietzsche

Turin (Italian: Torino, Piemontese:Turin) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The city is located mainly on the western bank of the Po River, in front of Susa Valley, and is surrounded by the western Alpine arch and Superga Hill.

Quotes

• Turin is a very fine city. In the matter of roominess it transcends anything that was ever dreamed of before, I fancy. It sits in the midst of a vast dead-level, and one is obliged to imagine that land may be had for the asking, and no taxes to pay, so lavishly do they use it. The streets are extravagantly wide, the paved squares are prodigious, the houses are huge and handsome, and compacted into uniform blocks that stretch away as straight as an arrow, into the distance. The sidewalks are about as wide as ordinary European STREETS, and are covered over with a double arcade supported on great stone piers or columns. One walks from one end to the other of these spacious streets, under shelter all the time, and all his course is lined with the prettiest of shops and the most inviting dining-houses.There is a wide and lengthy court, glittering with the most wickedly enticing shops, which is roofed with glass, high aloft overhead, and paved with soft-toned marbles laid in graceful figures; and at night when the place is brilliant with gas and populous with a sauntering and chatting and laughing multitude of pleasure-seekers, it is a spectacle worth seeing.Everything is on a large scale; the public buildings, for instance--and they are architecturally imposing, too, as well as large. The big squares have big bronze monuments in them. At the hotel they gave us rooms that were alarming, for size, and parlor to match. It was well the weather required no fire in the parlor, for I think one might as well have tried to warm a park. The place would have a warm look, though, in any weather, for the window-curtains were of red silk damask, and the walls were covered with the same fire-hued goods--so, also, were the four sofas and the brigade of chairs. The furniture, the ornaments, the chandeliers, the carpets, were all new and bright and costly. We did not need a parlor at all, but they said it belonged to the two bedrooms and we might use it if we chose. Since it was to cost nothing, we were not averse to using it, of course.Turin must surely read a good deal, for it has more book-stores to the square rod than any other town I know of. And it has its own share of military folk.
  • Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad chapter 47

• Turin, lieber Freund, ist eine capitale Entdeckung ... der erste ort, in dem ich möglich bin!
  • Turin, dear friend, is a capital discovery ... the first place where I am possible!
    • Friedrich Nietzsche to Heinrich Köselitz, April 20, 1888, in Christopher Middleton, ed. and trans., Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), 295; in Nietzsche, Briefe, 1887–89, KSB 8, 298.

• For me, the way to Memphis and Thebes leads through Turin
  • Jean-François Champollion, quoted in Anthropologie (1962-) Vol. 56, No. 3, Special Issue: Papers dedicated to the memory of Eugen Strouhal Part 2 (2018), pp. 195-210 (16 pages)