Turin and three writers

"We don't remember days; we remember moments."

Notebooks of Ceare Pavese, (28.7.1940)

Twenty years ago the chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist, Primo Levi committed suicide in Turin, the place of his birth.

His account of the year he was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz, “If This is a Man” was rejected by Einaudi, the most prestigious publishing house in Turin. Eventually a far smaller house did publish, in November 1947, 60 years ago this year. Only 1,500 copies were sold. Eleven years later Einaudi eventually produced a revised work, which was translated into English in 1959…and so began the global journey of a great piece of literature that “bares testament” to the evil of the death camps.

The writing in “If This is a Man” is clear and precise, occasionally humourous. It isn’t written in hate but describes man’s capacity to oppress another with unflinching honesty. The fluent, positive and human qualities of Levi’s writings are not negated by the controversial circumstances of his death, though they do bring many questions. His life, and where it took him as a human being, remain inspiring. The powerful affirmation of life Levi describes when confronted by the systematic brutality of war, resonates today.



Freed on 27 January 1945, it took Levi nine months to return to Turin, his journey home by train with former Italian prisoners of war in Russia took him from Auschwitz in Poland, through Russia, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany. A chemist by academic training, Levi combined science and literature for many years. His “The Periodic Table” a collection of short pieces – fiction and non-fiction – but related in some way to one of the chemical elements, was voted “the best science book ever written” at the Royal Institution in London, two years ago.

Levi died on April 11, 1987, when he fell from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin. Elie Wiesel, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and himself a holocaust survivor, said: "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later." However, Levi left no suicide note, and no other obvious signs of an intent to take his own life; his remaining papers and the testimony for friends, suggest many plans for new projects.

The importance of Levi's manner of death is important though. If his work, personal and lucidly honest, is a powerful affirmation of life, is “suicide” a final comment on the validity of his message?

Street Song
Why be ashamed? When one has done time,

if they let one out, it's because like everybody else

who belongs to the streets, one has been in prison.
From morning till evening we wander the avenues

whether it's raining or a beautiful sun's showing its face.

It's a joy to meet on the avenues people who talk

and talking among ourselves, bump into girls.
It's a joy to wait and whistle at girls from doorways,

hug them on the streets and take them to movies 

and smoking in secret, lean on their beautiful knees.
It's a joy to talk and finger them laughing,
and at night in bed, feeling flung on one's neck

their two arms pulling you down, thinking of morning

when one is released from prison in the fresh sunlight.


From morning till evening wandering drunk
and watching laughing passersby enjoying everybody
— even ugly
people — just to feel themselves on the streets.

From morning till evening singing drunkenly
and meeting drunkards and starting discussions
that last a long time and make us thirsty. 

All these characters who go talking among themselves,
we want them with us at night, down in the trough,
and to hound them with our guitar
that skips drunkenly and cannot stay confined 

but throws the doors wide open to echo in the air —
outside water
or stars may rain down. It doesn't matter
if on the avenues at this hour no beautiful girls are strolling:
among us is one who laughs to himself
because he has also been released from prison tonight,
and with him, raising a ruckus and singing, we'll make it to morning.

Cesare Pavese

Translated by
Linh Dinh, a Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer and translator.

For a short time in the early 1930s at the Massimo d'Azeglio, Liceo Classico, a secondary school specializing in the “classics”, Primo Levi was taught by Cesare Pavese, already an anti-Fascist (he was arrested in 1935), and later to become one of Italy's best-known novelists.



Next year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Pavese. As a young man he was an avid reader and interpreter of English fiction, writing his thesis at the University of Turin on the poetry of Walt Whitman and translating many American and British writers into Italian. Arrested for receiving letters from a political prisoner in Rome he was sent into "confino", internal exile in Southern Italy for a year. Returning to Turin he worked Einaud as an editor and translator.

The loner, through choice or circumstance is a frequent figure in Pavese’s work.

“His relationships with men and women tend to be temporary and superficial. He may wish to have more solidarity with other humans, but he often ends up betraying his ideals and friends; for example in The Prison, the political exile in a village in Southern Italy receives a note from another political confinato living nearby, who suggests a meeting. The protagonist rejects a show of solidarity and refuses to meet him. The title of the collection of the two novellas is Before the Cock Crows, a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ.”

It is said that love frustrations and a political disillusionment with communism led him to his suicide, by an overdose of barbiturates in 1950 – the year in which he won the “Strega Prize” for 'La Bella Estate'’.

“It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter's night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.”

Chapter One, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller…

Born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, Italo Calvino spent his early years in Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, He moved to Turin in 1941, “after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. He often humorously described this choice, and used to describe Turin as ‘a city that is serious but sad.’ “ Wikipedia reports. He graduated from Turin's university with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper L'Unità; in 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist party, and his letter of resignation (soon famous) was published in L'Unità. In 1962.



In the 1950s he began to publish many works, fiction and non-fiction, perhaps the most famous, the “Italian Folktales”, an attempt to emulate the Brothers Grimm in producing a popular collection of Italian fairy tales for the general reader: it was the first comprehensive collection of Italian fairy tales.

The death of his editor, Elio Vittorini in 1966 (a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel "Conversations in Sicily", for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941) affected Calvino hugely and caused him to experience what has been defined as an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: "...I ceased to be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I'd been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early".

He began to visit Paris (where he was nicknamed L'ironique amusé), met Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and grew closer to the academic world, interests included classical studies (Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Giacomo Leopardi). He also wrote novels for Playboy's Italian edition).

In 1981 he was awarded the French Légion d'Honneur.

"Invisible Cities" was published in 1972 by Einaudi, a tale of magical realism that considers the imagination via the descriptions of cities by the narrator, Marco Polo.

“The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of Polo's descriptions (1-3 pages each) of 55 cities. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature.”

Invisible Cities is probably based, at some level on Il Milione, which we translate as The Travels of Marco Polo: the travelogue of the Mongol Empire was written in the 13th century, and shares with Invisible Cities

“the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities he visits, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region.”

I wonder if Tom had read it when he traveled. Or Laurence Sterne… In Milan now I keep thinking of Jim Hake's Turin show, "The Joy of Repetitions."

Jewels e Jim

The Associazione Culturale Azimut is about promoting new art; I stumble across its latest show, “The Joy of Repetition” in the Piazza de Città. In fact I am returning from a forlorn and ‘mournful’ visit to the ‘multi-ethnic’ hot spots north of the market square, where there are many bars; me and a cat.

No people.

In the Piazza de Città there is jazz guitar, free Camparis, interesting art, a large crowd, outside in the square thunder and lightning: why not? Part of the joy of travel is precisely not the following of guidebooks, ticking off churches or buying postcards in the national or regional gallery. Armed with Tom’s places (thankfully, in some senses, Tom is hungover in Turin and has no ideas about it, sees nothing, as far as he writes), buzzing with memories to re-haunt – I should concentrate on Eco and Pavese, perhaps later…



“The Joy of Repetition” is about the relationship between the ‘serial nature’ of reproduced art, and a restating of a “forfeited individuality”. Sculpture largely, the show by Jim Hake, an American, is in complete contrast, an antithesis, to the techniques and modes I am using: copying of data, art; the shuffling of culture, words, images and sounds by digital means. The memory stick as geo-social GPS system.



If the lifestyle I follow on the journey is slow, following the – actually rather speedy, given his options – footsteps of Thomas Coryat, my creative lifestyle is hyper fast: see, write, cut, photograph, edit – post. An entire morning’s sensory experience reduced to 500 words, written at speed to a self-imposed set of blogger deadlines. A friend wrote in the second week of the journey to say he’d written 400 words in the time I’d posted about 4000. Then again, he writes for the New Yorker, where accuracy, depth, and the “right” words are everything. The blogging life imposes a different, guilty, time frame.




In “Loneliness & Time, British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century”, Mark Cocker, notes that Patrick Leigh Fermour, one of the “great” English travel writers, “could agonise for years over the mot juste…”. Fermour’s trilogy about walking across 1930s Europe was begun 25 years after the events. Which makes it art, I suppose.




“The Joy of Repetition” is the first solo show of the 41 year-old Jim Hake. He’s lived in Turin for eleven years with his Italian wife, Silvia. Time, the very time that the digital appears to efface, is a major element in Hake’s work: in process, in the methodology of creation, and finally in our reception of the finished items. Hake’s work asks us to consider “speed”, particularly those of us used to the “click to learn about Cesare Pavese” school of instant scholarship.




Isn’t blogging in fact the motor-biking of writing? Where journalism is the cycling, and Rousseau-esque hiking in the hills, the novel? Just a thought; passing around Jim’s show.

He was born in Baltimore, and followed a frequent pattern in American life, of changing city “once every two years for a decade or so…” He is used to impermanence, perhaps this drives the solidity of his work, and his like of staying in Turin now. “I’d already met my wife by graduate school [she is a cultural anthropologist, the one, Jim says, who makes him travel these days] and I thought: what shall I be, one of 100,000 artist graduates in the US, or an artist living in the Mecca of art, Italy? I had a very romantic vision about Italian art, working in Italy. Of course in reality it is the art restoration Mecca, about the past rather than now.”

Down the road is the Foundation Sandretti, glamorously run by a man who curated the last Venice Bienale. Almost every famous contemporary artist is likely to drop by: it being a nodal point where money, fashion, art and style crash together, like atoms at CERN.

“I’m out of that scene,” Jim says. “That’s not such an easy place. To begin with when I moved here, curators were happy to put me in group shows because of my name, it was chic. It wasn’t Italian. That’s what they like here, the foreign, it comes with the scene. It’s not an easy scene, it’s about power, fame and influence.”



Jim says the change in continents changed his art utterly. He’d been used to space, a “big house, a garden…openness.” In Turin it was an attic and “no money.” He taught sculpture, worked in restoration to pay the bills and get started. Now with two children, Noah and Gaia, he strives to develop his artistic concerns. The next show is Toronto. “My wife is the one who gets me to move, I need time, to be ‘in’ one place. She’s a cultural anthropologist, so it is her that takes me to Africa, to ‘see’ the world.”

When he arrived, “people told me I had to meet this English speaker or that, because then my Italian wasn’t very good. Now I sometimes stumble in English, like now, because I speak Italian almost always. So I met some “English speakers” and the thing is, just because they speak English, so what? The question is: are they nice people. That’s the ex-pat thing.”

In the catalogue to the show Diletta Benedetto says: “In Hake’s art, every repeated action provides us with an opportunity for investigating, discussing and approaching a truth, a truth that is ultimately a composite image…”

In the work, as in the experience of living “elsewhere”, it is evident that repetition is a very modern and widespread concern. When Thomas Coryat came to a town or City literally everything was new. Was he also, perhaps, the first Englishman (though not the last) to have a hangover in Turin? In 2007 it can seem that everything is about variation on repetition. My journey is repeating Tom’s; in turn it repeats the journey of Tim Moore, and of Chris, “the Peregrine of Odcombe” who made the journey two years ago. In turn, being a voluntary exile, as Jim has become (like Olen in Budapest), is in itself brimmed full of historical resonance: is this like Stein or Hemingway; am I inspired by my location, does it affect the concerns of my work? Is it just about, as the high-school graduates told me, imagining somewhere else as “better”? As Jim says, his rational for Italy was that it is the art Mecca. Certainly that was true in Tom’s time, but now that Mecca has shifted: to London and New York, perhaps. More realistically, it has shifted to the transient troubadours that inhabit art fairs to sell their artists’ work” Freeze or Basle, or wherever…there are hundreds of art fairs now.



In using the “model” of mechanical reproduction, variegated through the ultimately human process of finishing a piece, Jim considers not just art but the infinity of repetitions, in mood, moment and method, of travel itself.

This is one of the Google-Generation’s largest paradoxes, the more we can know, the more we realize it has been done before. The “Me” era, when Time magazine makes “us” the person of the year, is about our individual self-improvement, our “rights” as consumers in the marketplace, who must in order to stay sane, deny the self-evident truth that someone else has done it before. Until technology (and whatever social forces that emerge to encourage community, rather than singular “scared of other” or “too chic to bother”, estrangements) can help to provide us with a balance between the serial repetitions of life, and the unique human variations of ‘our’ life, then it is perhaps better to be like Tom in Turin: too hungover to experience anything.

Tom as Easyjetter. Never thought I’d see the day. Thanks Jim: for me anyway, the work makes sense.

Turin

Olympics 2006, but not a tourist mecca yet

My observations of Turin.

“I am sory I can speake so little of so flourishing and beautifull a citie. For during that little time that I was in the citie, I found so great a distemperature in my body, by drinking the sweete wines of Piemont, that caused a grievous inflammation in my face and hands; so that I had but a small desire to walke much abroad in the streets. Therefore I would advise all English-men that intend to travellh into Italy, to mingle their wine with water as some as they come into the country, for feare of ensuing inconveniences, and let them follow the good counsel that learned Alciat giveth…





"...maybe I'll try a little Freddy..."



Red, but no Ferrari

“…Surely I observed it to be a faire city, having many stately buildings, both publique and private: it is the capitall citie of Piemont, situate in a plaine, being in the East incompassed with hills, well walled, and hath foure faire gates, and a very strong citadel at the west end, exceeding well furnished with munition, wherein there are five hundred pieces of ordinance."



“Is he a romantic, a poet, like Shelley?”
“The rhymer of the Ancient Mariner.”
“Or a junkie, like Peter Docherty?”
“Whatever, he looks like a professor, I can’t talk to him.”

Do you speak English?

“A little.”

What are you doing in this square at 11.30 on a Saturday night? Turin seems very quiet.

“It is holiday time, the students have all gone away.”

Where?

“The sea-side. The beach.”

And? “It is very early, the Muri [Murazzi, the riverside bar and club region] doesn’t get going for a few hours.”

So why are you here?

“We are waiting for the concert to finish, the Music Academy. We have friends there. On Wednesday our exams start.”
“One of them is ‘English’. So it’s good to practice.”
“You have to pass ‘English” now, it’s the most important language in the world.”
“After Italian.”

Of course.

“London? I love London, it is the biggest city in the world. I love that. So huge you can get lost all the time and something turns up. I’ve been many times, I want to live there. I love England, last year I spent a month in the ‘Lizard’ in Cornwall. Do you know it? I worked in a Fish and Chip shop. It was the best.”

This summer?

“Amsterdam next month for fun, fun, fun. And then after that, Greece for sun, sun, sun.”
“I’m going to Tunisia, and then in October to Brasil. My father’s friend has bought a house there, I think that will be cool.”

Not Italy?

“Why Italy when we have our whole lives to see it with our children? While we have the chance we have to see the world: Brasil, the desert, Holland. But London and England most of all. It is so exciting there. Anything can happen.”

We always want to be somewhere else…



“…The duke’s palace seemed to be faire, but I was not in it, onely I saw it without…”



The Cafe Mulassano, which first opened one hundred years ago, is said to be the place where the sandwich was first imported – from America, in 1927.

The Turin Shroud was moved from Chambéry to Turin in 1578. The next scheduled showing is for 2025.

The new Fiat advert is called “The Italian Job re-mixed.” Like many remixes it misses the point. The Italian Job is about Englishness, Minis and ambiguous, “camp”, sensibilities. Turin is just the backdrop – and the mountain end-game, of course. Tom would have liked that…




The woman sitting next to me is wearing a t-shirt with an image of a cow across her breasts. Underneath the cow are the words: “Self Service Milk.” She arrives by motorbike to the Piazzo Via Venetto with her boyfriend and clings to him all evening. Confident, but not confident enough…

Turin is a very clingy city; despite all the flesh being present and correct here, it feels dowdy; this is a city trying desperately to be as sophisticated as Rome or Milan, but not really knowing the steps.




Tim Moore recounts how James Boswell got Once, Twice, Three times a Lady in Turin: a Countess, a Noblewoman, and an ‘oldish lady’ in a theatre box. Sex was a big preoccupation with many of the Grand Tourists. It’s easy – but not with our Tom – to see aesthetic desire as the mask for just getting laid.



“I rode in coach from Turin on Monday, being the 13th of June about two of the clocke in the afternoone, and came to a Parish called Sian in Piemont about half an houre after eight of the clocke in the evening. This Sian was twenty miles beyond Turin.

“…the vineyards in Piemont and Lombardy doe much differ in growth from the French vineyards. For the vines in most of these places doe grow upon trees that are very orderly set in fine rankes about halfe a mile or a mile long in some places. …

“Betwixt Turin and Sian I was transported over a Ferrie. This Italian transporting was done after a pretty manner. For whereas this is a great long rope that reacheth over the river, tied by certaine instruments on both sides thereof, assoone as the horses and passengers are put into the boat, one of the boarmen that tarryeth at land turned by a certaine wheele about by meanes of that rope, by the motion of which wheele the boat is driven on to the other banke.

She drank a great Campari and drove a Red Ferrari...(Song lyrics that failed)

The poster in the window of a comic-book store is enough to end my self-imposed exhibition purdah. A black and white photograph from the 1950s of a woman sitting on the bonnet of a Ferrari. The image is promoting “Ferrari and the Cinema” at the National Museum of Cinema, housed in the Mole Antonelliana, the “symbol” of Turin. This is the world’s “tallest” museum, for those that calculate these things. There is a lift to the top, for an 85 metres above Turin kind of experience.

I’m with the exhibition: cinema, cars and actors…even Tom, had he not been hungover and so missing “all” of Turin, might have approved.

For while the greatest couplet in rock music, (in Rod Stewart’s seminal early 1970s album track, “Italian Girls”), She was tall thin and tarty and she drove a Massaratti, has the right idea about rock-visions of romance, it’s just the wrong car – stupid. The Turin based car manufacturers are 60 this year, it says inside the exhibition, though I feel sure Ferrari existed in the 1930s: then again, I know nothing of cars. And to celebrate they have co-curated an exhibition of films about Ferrari, and big famous films with Ferrari in.




In a massive – 85 metres high, I guess – central atrium visitors recline on full-length sofas with stereophonic head speaker-cushions, and watch the films. The movie-extracts have over 60 selections, including Roger Moore and Tony Curtis in The Persuaders. The 1970s was such a Ferrari moment, you feel. Even for a non-driver it is intoxicating stuff. The sports car as the ultimate vehicle of sophisticated travel, two seated, fast and free – and red. These are the cars that should be winding the mountain roads from Val Cenis – except that the owners of these cars will be in the south of France, or the Hollywood hills, not La Chambre with the biker-boys.

The show is very clever, combining the romance of pure cinema with the romance of Ferrari’s brand freedom. Because this is all about escape. Mid-life “Roberts” buy cars like this when the Porsche or the BMW 4x4 seems a little dull. Rock stars crash them; rappers have big-bootied babes who bounce in them – in videos. In “Goldeneye” the Russian ex-fighter pilot and man-killer beauty “Onatopp” races Bond across – yup the mountain roads around Cannes: owning a Ferrari doesn’t make you nice, but it does make you sexy.




The extracts are mostly a flashback to an era when this stuff was glamorous, and very unusual: rather than an exercise in bling culture. Faye Dunnaway sitting on her Ferrari filming Steve McQueen’s Thomas Crown (the one and only Thomas Crown) playing polo…then there’s…actually there is no need to go on, that image says it all.




Of course this is the city of "The Italian Job" (the one and only), and cars mean more here than many places, for work as much as anything. But the show, integrated perfectly with the permanent exhibition is a double vision of escape, betwixt film, cars and freedom.




The museum itself is a warm, quirky and iconic celebration of cinema, the best I’ve ever seen. Quotes from Baudelaire and Goethe frame the first displays: shadow puppets, moving lanterns, slide shows, a curtained-off exhibit of a stereoscopic woman not quite pulling a rabbit from a hat (reminding us that pornography has always been a driver of any newer technology or art form, from the canvas, through sculpture, photography, film, video, DVD and new media).



Perhaps this is why they police the Italian web so much...


Ascending around the sides of the curved building we see various examples of cinemas, numerous films, displays of how the “living room” and television have evolved (the last room is full of redundant piled-high old televisions, some playing back images of us walking around the show). The whole thing elides into a blur of sound, images and moods. It is as if travelling through a history not just of cinema, but of moments in the way we have seen ourselves. Being almost contemporary, the exhibition has far more impact than “classical” Italian art. We’ve seen too much of that.




It is easy here to think about the way we have been shaped, how the cinema has marked the way we behave, see, dress, and consume. My “Paris” has always been as much about the “Nouvelle Vague” as the tourist sights or the romances conducted; my alps as much about Bond (or the Sound of Music) as Franz Klammering down the slopes.


French film, Turin set. Don't ask. Late: no Belmondo

In fact so much of my mental geography takes its shape courtesy of cinema, older cinema, the stuff of youth and adolescnce most of all. Thus Thomas Crown. Ferraris. Freedom. It is interesting that a few of the later clips of Ferrari, set in McMansion Land in wealthy America, look a little tacky. It is simply not the same when an American man pulls a girl in hot pants because he has a big fast red thing to drive. Ferrari is Europe. European means Sophisticated. This is very old, reductionist thinking, naturally, but that is the mood here, unashamedly.

And so we leave exhilarated but a little sad. Sad not just that glamour is so commoditized these days, but also asking where are the great modern iconic films that everybody sees? Here at this show in mournful Turin (I quote many of the Grand Tourists, and tend to agree) I fall utterly for the magic of cinema again: I feel my age as well, enjoying the 50s and 60s and 70s far more than anything more modern. What is most saddening is the realization that the collective experience of cinema has atomised into markets: the multiplex, the living room, the many rooms with television, the personalized download – legal or not.


A Ferrari store downtown.

Back at the hotel I find England Under 21 versus Italy Under 21 at football on tv. I rush out again into the night to find a bar in which to share this moment of Anglo-Italian togetherness. Football, along with festivals and free concerts being the only times we truly come together now. I run down a portico’d street in the rain, thinking of Antonioni movies in Bologna, of Jean-Pierre Leaud in “Last Tango”, of Mario Brava, and Dario Argento. Great film makers with the architectural – and populist, almost – touch. I turn a corner and…”schuss”. A girl stands with a clipboard in one hand, her finger to her mouth in silencing gesture. They are making a film, tonight. It is a secret, no photos please,” she says.



The actors begin. In French. I look in vain for Belmondo. Or Connery. No matter, those guys are in the National Museum of Cinema. Turin’s great secret shroud. There we can think about an art form that changed us all; and perhaps its gentle message is that the form is shortly to be a museum piece itself. At least in stormy-mournful late night Turin the magic is still being made.

England 2: Italy 2. Everyone is happy, after the second Campari. But outside there is only one Ferrari to take us home.



Right opposite the Gramsci hotel as well.

Probably a football player.

Business Travels

The Turin rail station, the Porta Nuova, is a sea of rubbish; the computer is down at the tourist kiosk, “because of all the construction – here’s the photo-copy”, and outside building works are beached on every corner, including the “balcony” of the hotel room which is sheathed in my first Turin shroud, comprising plastic, rubble and girders. No religious image; that’s on the postcards down the portico.

Not so much a first impression, as a “moment”, the kind all cities can produce after, say, crossing the alps, or spending a lot of time in small towns. It is still a moment; a moment that evolves by taking the “wrong” turn from the station-side hotel and entering a bleak world of other cheap hotels, porno cinemas – so they still exist? – and the atmosphere of an Eastern European smelting town, circa 1965. It’s like turning left at Euston station and thinking you’re about to find Sienna. Thus the miseries of travel.




Which, of course, is all very unfair: the product of tiredness, sun and the ways of cities. If I was a surrealist (and this was 1920) I’d be happy to be confronted with these symbols of city life: the come-hither hookers, the tall and imposing office buildings, the wide car lanes and the (quite terrible) drivers. I don’t dislike this, for it is how cities are beyond the marketing plans; it’s just different from La Chambre or even Rivoli.

To use an anology it’s like coming to Manhattan first via a long walk in Queens, and then circling Central park (in this case walking a few miles along the Po river, gazing at hundreds of empty riverside cafés, a lot more building work, and gaggles of policemen buying ice creams or esperessos). It is fair, perhaps, to say that Turin is not yet a true tourist destination. Later, when I have walked and walked through the porticoed centre, seen plenty enough culture, and sat outside squares as big as the People’s Palace in Bucherest, I never quite shuck-off the idea of industrial surface, a “B” grade INSEAD project in urban renewal, no matter how hard I try.




The “myth” of Turin lies somewhere between the vectors of business, football and cars: only the former would Tom have had to consider, probably at the market-place in what is now the Piazza del Republica (and still as multi-ethnic as Tom’s time, I suspect). The closest he would get to the football-car thing is a troubadour on horseback. Or a bandit, resting from hard labours in the mountain passes.

The Dukes of Savoy ruled from Turin, and its location makes it very “nodal” for business, coming from either Venice, or Lyon. It’s said to be a city of the “night”. So at vampire hour I go to the piazza Vittorio Venetta to do the business.




“I’m surprised,” says American Robert, “by how people make some money by self-publishing and working with small companies these days.” He’s one of those men, easy in easy soft clothes, coiled-up in relaxation; and quite often utterly bald.

But shiny.




They exist everywhere in big cities, where they often to be found talking about ‘where next?’

“It’s a busy August,” he tells The Apprentice. “Nairobi, Cologne, home, Cambodia. I’m really looking forward to Cambodia.” The Apprentice has the role common in international business – yes man. When TA states an opinion it is so that “Robert” can reposition it. You’re right: but I am righter. Avoiding eye-contact (which is only for superiors) Robert stares towards the Po river, not for inspiration, more a semi-benevolent though weary stimulus to his explanation. Or a tiny act in the perpetual power play of business man-hood, you take your choice.




“With Amazon, and some of those other sites, a writer can publish and broker a small income,” Robert says, following a standard convention of explaining the snow-blindingly obvious truth with the air of Homeric Ode. I once worked for an Englishman overseas who “found” words in the OED, and made up new definitions for the “marketplace” - trade-marking them if he could. He relied on difference, eye-contact (all his clients were superiors), and a fine eye for the fine chance.

TA asks Robert about his role in Turin, then tries, hesitantly, to define it for himself.
“It isn’t that simple. What I do is very hard to explain [to simpletons and inferiors]. I usually say ‘management’: most people can understand that. The thing is, what we do has its own special language, and people can’t understand its frames of reference. ‘Platforms’, ‘Integration compatibilities’, ‘optimized thinking.’ If I said I was working for the UN improving on the accountable performance matrixes, people would get the wrong idea.”

The Apprentice Nods, as Apprentices Must. I think he has the idea. He’s the IT guy, and Robert has to prove he “knows”.




“This Wikipedia is good,” Robert says. “We were trying to get this guy from Grozny – that’s in Chechnya [ spoken slowly, for the slow]. So we talked to our travel guys and they told us Chechnya doesn’t have an airport. So I had someone check, on the internet, and we used Wikipedia, or Google, and we found that it was re-opened in March. It isn’t even on the Aeroflot website yet. We sent the code [web address?] to the travel people and they said they’d sort it. It’ll still be a miracle if he makes it. But I’d love to meet him. Chechnya, there’s a market.”




It is one of truths of being overseas for any length of time, working and living, that characters change – or rather they morph into a defensive aggression that is, in part, constructed out of the implicit question: “what went wrong at home?” We become bigger, more confident than at home, less risk averse. Though the world is small now.




When I moved to Budapest, knowing nobody, I soon met some ex-pat Americans. One, some kind of musician, popped out of the bar we were in, Googled me, and returned to ask about some part of my old life…the whole exercise took about 15 minutes, and my history was then part of my new life, despite the inaccuracies of the article. Hence the construction of social fortifications; this “biggerness”: “abroad” we can be mysterious, imperial, libidinous, “big fish.”

Robert is riffing on new media now. “So this guy, he’s an Armenian, you been there? He’s the secretary of the Farmers’ union, and he hasn’t got email. Imagine that.” Apprentice does, to no conclusion. He asks about the “deal” brewing: there are “complications” it seems. “Couldn’t you set up one of those ‘China funds’ and just buy it?”
“In Russia?”
“Yes, in Russia.”
“In Russia that would be like boxing from the floor."




Which is how I feel a little in Torino, where for no definitive reason, other than a noticeable change in masculine self-regard – it’s ratcheted up considerably since France, even with foreigners – I’m thinking about commerce. Commerce and male anxiety. Am I mistaken or is there some kind of crisis going on here?

“It is the law, the fight against Terror,” Maria says. “Since 2005. If you want to use our computer we have to know everything about you. Are you a terrorist?” Maria leans forwards, she’s wearing a small pink bra and has a good tan. Then she takes my passport, sees my age, leans away, romance over. “So old,” she says. “I guess you’re not a terrrotist. Three euros, one hour.”




Thus continues my odyssey in the suspicious world of Italian Internet. At the internet point in the hotel the “law” is photo-copied about the terminal. The manager, Pietro, cannot find the password to log on, though. And this after numerous attempts, a geeky assistant’s assitance, two mobile phone calls and two re-boots. On the third I get some kind of access. “Firewalls,” Pietro says, “so we can protect ourselves.” I try and surf, but so many sites are blocked, so many pop-ups pop-up advising me that this is being monitored. By who? The police who aren’t buying ice creams on the Po?




Maria works afternoons and nights at the cyber point near the University. “It’s busy but not mad,” she says. “students and strangers, mostly.” Perhaps it is good that technology isn’t so easy here: it forces a different kind of social interaction, though I’d love to have Cesare Pevese or Umberto Eco’s details at my fingertips. I ask the American artist, Jim Hake, who has lived here for eleven years how much he uses it.
“It’s an illusion, not real,” he says. “You move someplace and try and keep a sense of identity you email friends back home. But when you meet them face to face you realize you’ve changed, and they have. There’s nothing there.” His work – which I’ll feature separately – is about the betwixt nature of modern art; Hake investigates in sculpture the ideas of mass reproduction in the age of the digital…



Eileen works for a language school here. She’s organizing the business travel of one of her investors, from Ireland. The office wi-fi is down, so they are in the cyber café. “If you fly via London you can be in Cork by…it’s much cheaper…no wait, let’s try this one…”

“Good, finally,” says another (Irish) Robert, sitting annoyed and unencumbered with labour.

Cesare Pavese committed suicide in a hotel, the Alburgo Roma, down the road (Wiki tells me: 'The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, grossly mimic the last scene of 'Tra Donne Sole' (Among Women Only), his penultimate book') but I don’t know why; but I am struck by thoughts of business pressure (this is Fiat Town, after all), and the curious and very evident Madonna-whore vision of many of the men here. Even the porno cinema was advertising “mature” products, illustrated by women of “age and size”. I haven’t seen the films, so who knows? Turin, despite its grandest squares, “the biggest in the world”, and its stylish outdoor lifestyle, has in turn a heavy thunder-clap of claustrophobia, and old-fashionedness . Is this just the war on terror? I don’t think so.




On the World Service last night Kristen Scott-Thomas talked long about the benefits of French life, most specifically the rights for women, and mothers. “It’s fantastic,” she says (I’ll look for the transcript). Here I’ve already seen three shouting matches and stormy separations between pouty men and women. That’s more separations than an entire season at Crystal Palace football club. I’m sure these things are true in other cities, other countries. Anxiety, “proving yourself”, being part of the male-female dynamic, are three sides of the contemporary triangulation. Strange still, to be having these thoughts in sunny Torino.





Up a porticoed street somewhere in the city Umberto Eco is presumably working on the answers right now; or showing how simlilar signs and signifiers were present in Renaissance Italy. The same issues of power, position and gender politics were, after all, the concern of the Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli. Who, incidentally, died not knowing that his “Prince” would have any influence, let alone be a bible for the “Roberts” of this world. Eco is Casuabon style knowledge with PowerPoint simplicity of prose, sort of. Tom would have liked Umberto Eco, so would I: but he’s not answering his emails.

Outside the university a group of students are filming an elderly white-haired man, Umberto Two, quite possibly. I can’t hear what is going on because the men who drink in the car-park opposite are singing a loud song, and the police are still running the squares in search of an over-long skirt or a under-priced Campari. Perhaps the song is about love; I can’t tell. As Robert might say: “The thing is, what we do has its own special language, and people can’t understand its frames of reference.”




Almost home and I bump into the Gramsci hotel, named, I hope, after the Marxist thinker, imprisoned (and dying) for his views. Gramsci’s ideas meant something twenty years ago, another way of seeing how society might work, “Marxism today” and all that. Now he’s a hotel in the seedy part of town. That’s the market for ideas, these days.




Thus much of business. Next is art, cinema and fun.