Beautiful Day in Torino

It turned out to be a very nice day. Rain is still forecasted but not until much later this evening.

We started the day at the Egyptian Museum just a few minutes walk from Gelato Pepino.

The museum has one of the world’s most significant papyrus collections. with nearly 700 whole or reassembled manuscripts and over 17,000 papyrus fragments. The one below is one small section of a very long death story.

In the early 20th century, an Italian archeologist went on an Egyptian dig to look for more artifacts. Here’s one of the cameras he used to document their work.

After finishing at the museum, we walked about 10 minutes back to Piazza Castello and headed to the Royal Palace. I know I said we wouldn’t be going to another palace, castle, chateau or church for a while but that was before we decided to come to Italy. So…here’s the next palace.

The Royal Palace of Torino was the home of the Savoy family who ruled much of Italy for many years. In case you didn’t know, Italy was only unified as a country in 1861. Prior to that, it was made up of kingdoms ruled by the most powerful house in the kingdom. One of the most famous is the di’Medici family in Florence. The House of Savoy ruled the Piedmont (far northwest) and Sardinia areas. Upon unification, the country was ruled by a King until it became a republic after the war.

Six years ago there was a statue of a bull in this exact spot.

The front of the palace was covered in scaffolding so there wasn’t much to take a picture of but here’s a shot from the garden.

The palace was originally built in mid-16th century and modernized about a century later.

In one of the rooms, a restorer was doing work on the wall panels. It was pretty cool to watch her work.

The Shroud of Turin has been housed in the Royal Chapel since the mid-15th century. Once believed to be the shroud used to wrap Jesus after the crucifixion, carbon dating in 1988 shows the cloth is from the Middle Ages.

The chapel dome was amazing.

Next we planned to visit the Cathedral but by the time we got down there it was 1230 which is when the building closed for riposo. In Italy virtually everything, except bars and restaurants, shuts down for from about 1-3pm and sometimes even longer. The Cathedral wasn’t opening again until 4pm so this is the only photo we were able to get.

So instead of visiting the Cathedral, we headed around the corner to Pizzium for lunch. According to TripAdvisor, it has the best pizza in Torino. Northern Italy is not known for pasta or pizza, but lunch was pretty good.

I could tell Peter was getting tired, so after lunch we headed back to the tram. We got home early but that gave me a chance to do a quick load of laundry. There’s no dryer but the sun is on the balcony so, hopefully, everything will dry before it rains later this evening.

We enjoyed our short time in Torino but 1 1/2 days is plenty. We were only here for a half day in 2018 but we were able to walk a little farther than we did this time. Here are a couple of other pictures from that trip.

One cool building in Torino is the Mole Antonelliana, which for a time, was the tallest masonry building in the world. It now houses the Museum of Cinema. We didn’t get that far this year but saw it in 2016. It’s in the middle of the block and is so tall that it’s almost impossible to get it in a picture. Here’s one I found on pixabay.

Tomorrow we head about 90 minutes east to Milano. We spent 4 days there in 2016 but since that was the way we had to go to get to our next stop in France (weird to have to drive east to end up north but there are only so many ways through the mountains), so we decided to spend the day. We saw the Milan Cathedral from the outside in 2016, but never made it inside. We hope to do that tomorrow so be ready for more pictures of stained glass windows. Fair Warning!