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Festa del Balon, Palazzo Reale, the Armeria

Sunday, 1st October (Day Fourteen)

I had a busy morning so wasn’t sure how I was going to fit all my plans in:

  • The area Street Festival – Festa del Balon from morning till night
  • Any of five museums that will be free (first Sunday of each Month) – I’d chosen the Palazzo Reale since it’s close by and actually sounds the most interesting

Krish popped down to the festival area while I was busy. He said he enjoyed the music so we headed down briefly to see what else was going on. No music and seems quietish. There was a lady selling really cute hoods so I may get onto her Facebook page and buy one. I like a hood that covers my ears and neck and these really fit the bill.

The Palazzo Reale is not very far away so we walked over there fairly quickly. Pop into the ticket office and the first Sunday of each month they’ll hand over a ticket with no fuss at all. The visitors tour is all upstairs and you enter straight up an impressive marble staircase. The walls are lined with statues and the ceiling is painted, like most of the ceilings in here. Paintings on the wall complete the scene and, as we walk through, I recognise one or two. The Children of Charles I by Anthony van Dyck is one and I wonder if this is original – I do know that Turin has a lot of Dutch collections – not entirely sure what the connection is there.

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The Dream

Several years ago I knew that I wanted to spend a few months – I thought a season – somewhere else. I’d seen a movie with Colin Firth that totally inspired me, A Summer in Genoa.

Something about the idea of transplanting yourself for a while somewhere completely different appealed to my nomadic self. I’d done this before after all but not for many years and usually not temporarily.

I did once go to San Francisco, pretty much on a whim, intending to stay. It was a memorable six months.

I didn’t know where this time. Over the years it has mostly been Porto but somehow it became somewhere in Italy instead. Perhaps it was the language. I’m really not sure.

And then it was Torino. Mostly it was Torino because of Krish. That’s the truth. But there’s more to it than that. I like the market, the multicultural population, the working class areas, the size of it and the people. It doesn’t feel like the rest of Italy so much for some reason. Sure there are palaces and museums (Turin was the first capital city of Italy) but I barely give those a thought.

And then it became two months instead of three. Economics and other things played into this. On my own, I would have gone to a second city for the second month. Somewhere smaller like Bologna, where I at least knew one person, Esmeralda, my teaching friend from Toronto. And I thought I was coming alone for quite some time. It all changed a couple of months ago and then the trains were booked and the apartment rented and that was that.

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