A Travel to Turin, Italy, Europe.

A Travel to Turin, Italy, Europe.

There's a whiff of Paris in Turin's elegant tree-lined boulevards and echoes of Vienna in its stately art nouveau cafes, but type no bad – this elegant, Alp-fringed city is utterly self-possessed. The innovative Torinese gave the earth its first saleable hard chocolate, perpetuated one of its greatest exposures (the Holy Shroud), popularised a best-selling car (the Fiat) and inspired the black-and-white apoplexy of one of the planet's capacity iconic football team (Juventus).

Turin also gave the den Italy as we now know it: Piedmont, with its wily Torinese president, the Count of Cavour, was the engines room of the Risorgimento (literally 'the Resurgence', referring to Italian unification). Turin also briefly served as Italy's first medium and donated its monarchy – the venerable, possibly past it, House of Savoy – to the newly unified Italian lands in 1861.

The 2006 Winter Olympics shook the city from a heart post-industrial malaise, and sparked an urban revival, with a cultural knock-on imprint that has seen a contemporary art, draft and formatting location flower in the city