Trouble In Turin

The world’s finest art museum is in Turin. Ranked highly not because it has the Mona Lisa (that’s in Paris), or because of the number of paintings it holds (a modest number), or its architecture and/or aesthetic (outstanding btw). It’s the best because it’s the only museum in the world where you can pay a few dollars for admission, and sit alone in a gallery crammed with Picassos and Matisses and gaze at them blissfully in silence.

Turin is off the tourist trail. If this city was in any other country, it would be bustling with tourists to stroll its beautiful streets, tour the ancient palaces of its royalty, taste French influenced Piedemontese gastronomy, and drink its fine wines, Barolo and Barberesco to name a few. But this is Italy, where it competes with the likes of Rome, Venice, and Florence.

Turin's heavy industrial history has also deterred it from being put on the grand tour of Europe of previous generations. Thanks to the Agnelli family, the city was the center of Italy's automobile industry for more than half a century.

Gianni Agnelli grew his company, Fiat, in Turin. It became Europe’s largest automobile company during the 1950s & 60s. He spent his wealth on his hobbies, of which there were many: football, women, motor racing, sailing, art. In his later years, he passed his personal art collection to the city on the condition they would build a museum to display it to the public. A year before his death in 2003, the Pinacoteca Agnelli museum was born.

A recurring theme of Modern art is fleeting scenes of beauty and desire. The paintings the museum highlights, Picasso and Mattise, especially focused on ephemeral scenes of romance.

But sadly, we are past the honeymoon stage. We gaze at the painting together. The label says: Henri Matisse, Femme et anémones. The young staff member, who trailed us in the gallery, has returned to the reception desk. We are alone.

“We’re surrounded by tens of millions of dollars of artwork…” I say, grinning in awe. I hold my finger as if to touch the oil painting. There is no glass.

“Don’t touch it.”

“Just joking.”

“Just don’t touch it.” She frowns. “I’m almost done. Where are we going next?”

“Let’s stay a little longer?”

“The paintings all look the same after a while. Let’s get something to eat. And, there’s a shopping mall downstairs.”

I stare at the painting again. The woman in the scene has a look of joyful contentment. She was like that a long time ago.

Things change. Moments of happiness and contentment are fleeting. A facet of the human condition is to want more. A private museum full of Matisses and Picassos, I can’t do more than this, are the unspoken words on my lips.

Why doesn't she enjoy this more? I ask myself. Maybe because she’s young at heart, and this art feels as if it’s from another era. Like much of the city of Turin.

Walking through Turin’s streets, one notices much of the city’s population looks over the age of fifty. There are few young people. People in their 20s and 30s have left to work in Milan or Rome, or overseas. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Turin is a dying city.

Beyond here, the country of Italy as a whole is having a population crisis. This is the country of Amore–Italian men stare at every woman in the street with desire in their eyes–yet, the country has one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Fewer and fewer children are brought into the world each year.

This perhaps parallels the life of Gianni Agnelli himself. Despite being one of the world’s most infamous playboys of the 1960s, having had dozens of girlfriends (whilst married), he produced only two children. He was not an Elon Musk.

The family’s fate to prosper and not multiply cut deeper. Angelli’s only son Edoardo felt so burdened by the pressure of being in Italy’s leading business family that at the age of 46, he threw himself from a bridge into the River Stura and died.

The day before we visited the museum, I had stood on our Airbnb balcony and watched the sunset, gazing over the classical architecture of the Campidoglio district. Someone had watched me. A housewife on another balcony who was smoking a cigarette. She caught my gaze. I studied her, and she didn’t turn away. Welcome to Italy, she appeared to speak with her body language. Too bad Edoardo hadn’t looked at the scenery back in the year 2000.

As we leave the museum, and the abandoned industrial building it’s in, we hear a buzz of activity coming from across the street. As we near, we see a crowd of young business professionals. A dozen tables of 20-something fashionably dressed men and women eating lunch, talking excitedly.

I vaguely recognize the logo above the cafe. I’ve seen it somewhere before.

We enter the gourmet supermarket behind the cafe. Out of curiosity, I scan the pamphlets on display. This is the founding store of Eataly, it says, a company which started with this shop founded in 2007, and has now spread across the world to 23 stores, including 8 in the United States and 5 in Japan. New life has sprung from the rusting industrial estate of an old Fiat factory. One door closed and another door opened.

Wherever you are, find the best in it, and make life happen.