Turin opened Italy's first modern-art museum in 1863 and never stopped: Arte Povera was born here, car factories became galleries, and the Regio hides a Mollino interior. Three days inside the city's working art scene.
Italy's first civic modern-art collection, founded 1863: some 45,000 works from Canova and Modigliani to Warhol, Boetti and Paolini, rehung thematically across two floors. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, closed Monday.
The teaching collection of the 1678 Accademia: sixty Gaudenzio Ferrari preparatory cartoons, panels attributed to Filippo Lippi and dense Piedmontese Baroque canvases, hung salon-style in one galleried hall.
Twenty-five paintings Gianni Agnelli kept privately — Canaletto, Matisse, Balla, seven Renoirs — inside Renzo Piano's steel-and-glass Scrigno, perched beside Fiat's 1923 rooftop test track, now a garden of 40,000 plants.
Mario Merz's igloos and neon Fibonacci numbers occupy a 1930s Lancia thermal power station in working-class Borgo San Paolo, with rotating shows by younger artists and the Mario Merz Prize exhibition each autumn.
Carlo Mollino's 1973 auditorium is a scarlet velvet cavern of 1,500 seats behind Benedetto Alfieri's surviving 1740 façade, rebuilt after the 1936 fire. Tours cover the stage machinery and understage rehearsal rooms.
Italy's first public reading club fills a frescoed piano nobile: five salons of worn armchairs, free entry, and an almost daily programme of author talks, translation workshops and readings. The café serves light lunches.
Turin's dedicated photography centre occupies a converted Lancia office block, staging three or four substantial shows a year — Ghirri, Arbus, Capa, Italian reportage — across 2,000 square metres. Open daily 11:00–19:00.
The 1753 horseshoe theatre where Vittorio Alfieri premiered his tragedies and Pirandello staged Six Characters in Search of an Author. Gilded boxes, 800 seats, and a Teatro Stabile prose season running October to May.
Europe's oldest flea market has traded here since 1856: roughly 250 Saturday stalls of Savoy silverware, Fiat parts, brass fittings and vinyl, spilling through the arches behind the Porta Palazzo food market.
The 1763 café facing the Consolata sanctuary, where Cavour, Dumas and Nietzsche drank bicerin: espresso, drinking chocolate and cream layered in a stemmed glass. Eight marble tables and the original walnut panelling.
Nineteen thousand square metres of 1895 railway repair sheds relaunched in 2017 as a contemporary-art and music complex: commissioned installations in the vaulted Duomo hall, a concert stage and the Snodo courtyard bar.
A vaulted brick cellar beneath Piazzale Valdo Fusi programming Piedmontese trios, hard-bop quintets and open jam sessions six nights a week, with two sets from around 21:30 and table service at the front rows.