Movin' on up

To the east side, even. Today’s bone-wearying trek takes me to the “newer” part of Turin, encompassing its eastward expansion to the Po River. I’m no city planner, but it seems that the typical progression of a city is to start down by the water’s edge (hence the word “downtown”) and gradually grow up and out into the hinterlands. Turin didn’t do this. The city’s occupiers and rulers (the Celto-Ligurians, Romans, Lombards, Franks, the House of Savoy, the French) evidently thought it was wiser to hold the high ground. It wasn’t till the mid-1800s that the “Borgo Nuovo,” or “the new neighborhood” began to take shape. Aside from the area around the towering Mole Antonelliana, there are almost no tourists in this part of town, where craftspeople, dog walkers and students seem to predominate. I begin here, at the Piazzo Carlo Alberto, where this impressive structure was built to house the nation’s parliament. Oops … bad timing. The capital was moved from Turin to Florence in 1864 (and finally, to Rome, in 1870), so it was never used for its grand purpose. It now houses a museum chronicling the “Risorgimento,” or the unification of Italy. This is a relatively young country, only six years older than Canada.


My first glimpse of the Mole Antonelliana, the strange, hulking landmark that was once the world’s tallest brick building. When I first read of it, I thought it must be like the TV towers in Toronto and Berlin -- instantly visible from any vantage. Strangely, it’s not. I find “The Disgrace,” mentioned earlier, to be a more reliable compass. Anyway, it houses the National Cinema Museum, and that’s where I’m headed.


We must be getting close. Is that Robert Culp? Jesus, Richard Crenna wasn’t available? Dom DeLuise declined? Might Conrad Bain around the next corner? [OK, OK, it's Mastroianni. I had a mild stroke.]


The new bike-rental system in Turin started just this April. They’re super-nice 7-speeds with baskets, fenders, chain guards, Schwalbe city tires. There is a glitch, however. You can’t use a credit card. You have to buy some kind of proprietary bike-rental card elsewhere and then scan it here. The signs don’t tell you where to buy a card but merely refer you to a Web site and phone number. A horrible, horrible idea. Which is probably why the rack is full of bikes!


The Mole (which translates roughly to "massive bulk"), comes into view again.


School is back in, evidently. This is some kind of humanities college. With the end of vacation season, the city seems livelier and more crowded than it did only three days ago.

I really should ease up on the crostini. The film museum shows us all the optical tricks people had to work out before cinema could be born. Magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, taumatropes, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes -- all of these playthings made images move before celluloid came along. It sounds boring, but these gadgets are the flint tools, if you will, in the archaeology of film, and this normally fidgety museumgoer spent three hours checking them out.


It’s hard to explain the scale of the National Film Museum. It is definitely a tribute to verticality.


Not a very good picture, but a projector places me in a scene from “The Matrix.”


An elevator goes to the top, rewarding you with views like this. Topographically speaking, Turin is in a bowl, and unless it rains or the wind blows hard, the air pollution blocks any view of the Alps. It was far worse in the 1950s and ’60s, when Turin schoolchildren, living in a city of heavy industry, knew of the Alps only from books.


The Mole gets its close-up. It’s so big, and there are so many competing buildings around, I don’t know how you’d ever fit it into your viewfinder.


The River Po. If you drank from it, you probably wouldn’t get sick. The domed building is the Gran Madre di Dio; the bridge is the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele. The hills in the background were the site of Dario Argento’s “Rosso Profundo” (“Deep Red”) and “Tenebre.” DO NOT WATCH THEM. They are the scariest horror films ever made and you will wet yourself. In the spirit of wholesome compromise, I offer you the following little movie. (Actually, it’s just a handy way of moving some of my pictures to somebody else’s server. Sleep on that, Viddler!)

movie.about.movies from Sluggh McGee on Vimeo.