After the palace, a detour that we didn't think through carefully. The art history teacher is a "crunchy," and she proposed to go on an "urban archeology" tour and see an old Fiat factory converted into a food exhibit sponsored by the Slow Food movement. Slow Food's mission is to preserve traditional cooking from the onslaught of fast food. So we agreed to go to this place, called Eataly. To get there, we took a tram, then a bus, 45 minutes each way.
Eataly turned out to be a red concrete and glass building...
...with a sketchy Vermouth Museum on the second floor...
... and a pretentious health food store/food court on the first floor. (The converted Fiat factory turned out to be the huge building across the street, which is now an enormous shopping mall and a movie theater.) It was lunch time, and the place was packed. I am not sure about slow food, but there was some very expensive food on display. The prices for these truffles are for one etto (100 grams):
To be fair, the bakery was not bad, and I ended up with a sandwich and a bottle of milk.
It seems the commercial "health food" business, places like Eataly, are rapidly invading and destroying the traditional Italian food culture. The only redeeming feature for me was free fast Internet access. But the students just loved the place!
After the Eataly lunch adventure we got back to town for a tour of the cinema museum. It is housed in the building called La Mole, which is an emblem of Turin (it is on one of the coins). The building started modestly, as a synagogue, but was never finished as such. Then it grew in height and became the tallest "traditional brick building." In fact at some point it was deemed unsafe and massive concrete reinforcements were built parallel to the original walls, basically a building within a building. The building is all open inside with the spiral gallery along the wall. Probably nobody knew what to make of it, until some genius proposed to put a cinema museum in it. Then a glass elevator was added at the center to take tourists up and down. It is sometimes called Torin's "Eiffel Tower." Here is Fellini's hat and scarf:
Turin had a street art week; one of the displays was lit Fibonacci numbers floating around la Mole in the night sky... Didn't get to see it. Another display, planets and stuff floating above one of the central streets:
I am telling you, a little self-conscious for Italy.
"Tired but happy," back to the hotel.
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