Piedmont Culture

Piedmont has a reputation within Italy for reserve and precision, and for taking its own pleasures seriously without advertising them.

Turin's café culture

The historic cafés — Al Bicerin, Baratti & Milano, Caffè Mulassano — are 18th and 19th-century rooms still in use rather than reconstructions. The bicerin, a layered drink of espresso, drinking chocolate and cream served in a small glass, is specific to the city. Chocolate is a local industry with real history: gianduja, chocolate cut with hazelnut, was created here when Napoleonic blockades made cocoa scarce and hazelnuts were not.

Slow Food

Founded at Bra in 1986 in reaction to a fast-food outlet opening in Rome, the movement grew into an international organisation and a university. Its biennial Terra Madre gathering in Turin is among the largest food events in the world, and its influence on how Italian regional produce is protected is difficult to overstate.

Architecture and art

Turin's Baroque is the work of two architects above all: Guarino Guarini, whose dome for the Chapel of the Holy Shroud is a geometric puzzle, and Filippo Juvarra, who built the Basilica of Superga and the hunting palace at Stupinigi. The Mole Antonelliana, begun in 1863 as a synagogue and never used as one, is the city's symbol and now the National Cinema Museum.

Language

Italian is universal, but Piedmontese is a Gallo-Italic language with its own literature, still spoken particularly by older generations. The western Alpine valleys hold two recognised minorities: Occitan speakers along the French border and Franco-Provençal further north, along with Walser German communities around Monte Rosa.

Festivals

The Ivrea Carnival culminates in the Battle of the Oranges, in which teams on foot pelt cart-borne opponents with several hundred tonnes of fruit — a re-enactment of a medieval uprising, and considerably more violent than it sounds. Alba holds its truffle fair through autumn and, the first Sunday of October, a donkey race that parodies the horse race of a rival town.