Savoy's capital built Italy's car industry spine
Turin (Torino), Piedmont's capital, was Italy's first national capital from 1861 to 1865 after serving Savoy and Sardinian kings from 1563. GaWC ranked it a Gamma global city as of 2018. Fiat, Lancia, and Alfa Romeo headquarters history make it the country's automotive hearth.
Long before the Savoy dukes arrived, the upper Po valley belonged to the Taurini, a Celto-Ligurian Alpine people whose chief town fell to Hannibal after a three-day siege in 218 BC. Rome founded Augusta Taurinorum in the 1st century BC, and Via Garibaldi still follows the old east-west main street, while the Porta Palatina gate survives near the cathedral. The Roman town held about 5,000 people inside high walls. Lombards, then Charlemagne's Franks in 773, then a local countship ruled it before the Counts of Savoy gained control through marriage.
Emmanuel Philibert, nicknamed Iron Head, moved the Savoy capital here in 1563, and the Royal Palace and a grid of arcaded streets followed. In 1706 a French army besieged Turin for 117 days and failed to take it; the Treaty of Utrecht then made the duke a king, eventually of Sardinia, and the architect Filippo Juvarra redesigned the city. After Napoleonic rule ended in 1814, Turin led the Risorgimento and earned the name "cradle of Italian liberty," with Cavour among its sons.
Losing the capital to Florence in 1865 did not stall it. The Fréjus Tunnel opened in 1871, Fiat was founded in 1899 and Lancia in 1906, and the 1902 exposition became a high point of Art Nouveau design. Workers occupied Fiat's Lingotto factory in 1920, and in March 1943 the city's plants launched the first mass strikes in Fascist Italy. RAF area bombing killed 2,069 residents and damaged 54% of buildings, and partisans freed the city on their own in April 1945.
Postwar car jobs drew so many southern migrants that Turin was called the third southern Italian city after Naples and Palermo, and the population peaked near 1.2 million in 1971 before industrial crisis cut it by over a quarter. About 855,000 live in the city proper today. It hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics and keeps the Museo Egizio, the Mole Antonelliana and the Shroud.
Source: Turin
