Story in pictures: Istanbul, Turkey, December 2014 & March 2016

 

 

 

Turin: Why you should visit it, and we should come back

When you think of Italy, you think of Rome. Venice. Florence. Probably Milan. No one thinks of Turin. Turin is underrated. Lots of people think it's just an ordinary industrial city. I did, too. And the city proved me wrong. There are tons of reasons why you should book your next Italian trip to Turin. For once, it was the first capital city of Italy. Yup, you probably didn't know that.

Not only the first capital of Italy, it's also the royal capital

Turin is home to Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy, the first king of  the Kingdom of Italy. Although many other cities of Italy hosted noble families that reigned in the level of city-states, only Turin could claim itself as the first capital of the unified Italy. Turin is full of beautiful palaces in its grand squares. As babygirl said, it's full of the homes of Prince Eric (she's currently into Little Mermaid). The squares look amazing, the main square, Piazza Castello, has unusual water fountains coming out the floor surface which babygirl enjoyed so much. It also has direct view to the Royal Palace. If Piazzas and Palazzos are not enough for you, Turin also hosts the infamous Mole Antonelliana, also known as the Eiffel tower of Italy, now hosting the National Museum of Cinema, the tallest museum in the world. We wanted to take the panoramic elevator ride to its top, but we didn't make due to our limited time in Turin, so this tower is our first reason to come back to Turin soon.

Beautiful Piazza Castello where the Royal Palace (Palazzo Reale) and Palazzo Madama are located

It's a chocolate heaven, and food heaven in general

You're familiar with hot chocolate, and a big fan of chocolate spread. But you don't know where they were invented. Yup, in Turin. Since 17th century, Turin has been known as the chocolate capital of Europe. The famous chocolate spread with hazelnut Nutella? It started in Turin. There was a shortage of cocoa beans during the Napoleonic war, giving the idea for the locals to add hazelnut to get the cocoa texture. Later, Ferrero started to sell this hazelnut chocolate snacks for children, then the hot weather melted the chocolate and, there you go, Nutella was invented. If you're not a fan of chocolate, you still can eat well here. Turin is a home of grissini (breadsticks), which babygirl loved. The local pasta and risotto are cooked with local porcini mushroom (my husband's favorite) and truffles. I had the chance too cook tagliatelle with fresh truffles for the first time in my life, here! The streets of Turin are full of romantic little restaurants, pizzerias and cafes with the best coffee. One of our favorite part of the days was having breakfast (croissant a la crema, yum!) at Antony's bar close to where we stayed in Via Nizza.

World's most important Egyptian museum outside Egypt is here

This one is our second reason why we need to come back to Turin, because we didn't manage to visit this one! And we really, really wanted to. If you love Egyptian antiquities, or you really want to go to Egypt but didn't have to chance yet, or you had visited Egypt and feel nostalgic, you should visit this one. It hosts over 30,000 important artifacts including a collection of statues representing all the kings of the New Kingdom, mummies, papyrus and books of the dead originally belonging to the Drovetti collection and a painting on canvas dated from 3,500 BC. The museum's main entrance was featured in The Italian Job movie.

It's a very child-friendly city

I personally think Turin is much more child friendly than Venice, Rome and Florence. Don't get me wrong, the whole Italy is child-friendly. In our several trips to Italy, I can't remember any single shop, cafe or restaurant whose staff wouldn't offer free treats, gifts, souvenirs, foods to babygirl. Everyone's simply in love with babies. But Turin is special. The fact that it's not (yet) world famous like Venice and Florence makes it a more relaxing city. Unlike in Florence, we could stroll in Turin and enjoy the city with no fear that we'd lose sight of babygirl running in the crowd. Strolling along Po river in Turin was also much nicer for her than it was along Arno river in Florence (where there was traffic jam of people walking, in November!) We found a lot of playgrounds in Turin which she enjoyed a lot, and, if your child is a big fan of squirrels like ours, Valentino Park of Turin is the perfect place. There are zillions of squirrels which are used to interacting with humans running around the huge beautiful park which also host the Medieval town and Valentino Castle.

Beautiful Valentino park that hosts Valentino Castle and the Medieval town

Playing with squirrels (left); Strolling along Po river at the Isabella bridge (right)

Well, it's my childhood dream :)

Back in the late 90s until early 2000s I was a loyal fan of Juventus FC, a football club from Turin. I watched every single match of Serie A -the highest level of Italian football league. I don't follow any of national leagues now, but there's a part of me that has always wanted to visit Turin. My husband doesn't watch the sport regularly either, but he's always in for a stadium tour, and he's collecting official jerseys of football clubs (which I think is super lame). The stadium tour -cost €22 for each- was cool, would've been cooler if I were still into Serie A today though. We were on the field, and we saw almost every room in the stadium, including the locker room. The tour ended in the museum which hosts memorabilia of the club since its establishment, and we closed our day in the official store. My husband got himself an official jersey and babygirl got herself a stuffed zebra which is the mascot of the club. If you're not into football, but you're into cars, you should definitely check the National Museum of Cars. Yes, Turin is home to FIAT, but the museum hosts around 80 automobile brands with over 200 cars including ones dated from the 19th century. We really wanted to visit the museum but we decided to save it for our next visit.

The inside view of the stadium

Will you make Turin your next Italian destination? We'd definitely come back! :)

It's not all roses on our trips

Is there a moment, when you look at your social media timeline and see pretty pictures of your friends on vacation, then you thought, wow, they look like they're having the time of their lives! And then you think, if I were going to vacation like that, with my child, there is no way it's going to turn out to be THAT fun, it's just gonna be a catastrophe!

For some reason of course I also just post pretty pictures to my social media, I'm not planning to shame my own child and post a picture of her having a tantrum, soaking wet full of tear, lying down in the middle of a square in Florence. But trust me, it happens. I wanted to share some not-to-pleasant moments happened in our last Italian road trip just to assure you, traveling parents, that it's okay to experience unpleasant incidents during your trips. Believe me it passes quickly and you'll forget them even quicker. But the sweet memories of the trips? Oh they stay forever.

So last week we did our Italian trip to replace our cancelled cruise (more about that here). We left home on Wednesday night after work and headed to Turin. Our initial route was Lake Garda-Turin-La Spezia-Cinque Terre-Pisa-Florence, but in the last minutes we decided to just skip Garda and drove directly to Turin. So what's was not all roses during our six-days trip?

These are the things she'll remember. All the fun she had!

Our six-year-old GPS had cost us an extra 150km and an Austrian vignette

Unfortunately our new car isn't equipped with a built in navigation system. That means, we're still using our GPS we bought six years ago and never updated. When I created the route in my head, I knew we needed to leave Ljubljana and head for the border with Italy in Gorizia, drive through Venice, Verona and Milan then arriving to Turin. We started to drive from Ljubljana around midnight and hoping to arrive in Turin at around 6am. My husband was driving, I put the GPS on for Turin and we realized something was wrong when we passed the border between Slovenia and Austria instead of Slovenia and Italy. Yup, our GPS led us to drive through Villach in Austria just to get back down to south to Italy after having to buy Austrian vignette (€18 with a tunnel). We had to drive 150km more than planned and paid an extra €25 of Italian toll for that. Instead of 6am, we got to Turin at 8am, of course, super exhausted, even with 3 cans of redbull. Of course, we stopped using this GPS and navigated with my iPhone the following days.

A train officer (almost) fined us €100 and he was calling the police

Right, we were in the train from Manarola (one of the five villages of Cinque Terre) heading to La Spezia, our "base" city where our hotel was located. I've got us two one-way train tickets which cost €4 each (it's only 10-minute ride). Babygirl had a free ride as kids up to 4-year-old didn't need to buy tickets. I read the warnings on the ticket that we had to validate the tickets before departure. But as we were rushing into the train which was about to leave, we didn't even find where to validate them. Five minutes into our ride, an officer came to check our tickets. I handed them and he said no, these are not validated. He said a lot of things but all I heard was a €50 fine for each. My husband was trying to apologize (and argue) with him for a good five minutes while I was trying to comfort babygirl who started to become so fussy. The guy threatened us to call the police if we wouldn't pay the fine, when we arrived to our station La Spezia, and we all went out. The guy asked us to follow him, so we thought it was over, we needed to pay the fine; when another customer was approaching him in panic outside the wagon to ask whether the train that was about to leave was hers. Before attending to her, the guy just shook his palms to us and said: just go, you're free to go. We turned our back and walked away the station in the speed of light. And while doing this, we saw a validating machine and my husband validated our tickets while we're leaving the station. Yup, my husband and his sense of humor.

A view of Manarola, Cinque Terre, which makes you forget of the train incident in just two seconds

We realized we're actually getting old, on a trip!

I'm only 28, and my husband's 33. I'm 7.5-month pregnant so he believes that is an important factor. But boy, we're no longer what we were 5 years ago! A few years ago we'd leave our office on a Friday afternoon and head somewhere, drive the whole night and arrive in our destination on Saturday morning and we'd be completely happy and fresh. Now? Yeah right! We were literally broken when we got to Turin at 8am after driving for almost 8 hours. He was doing most of the driving because I was falling asleep -I handled only around 150 km probably. We had a short nice talk with our friend who was hosting us in Turin before she left for her class, and we just slept until midday while babygirl was playing by herself with our friends' dog. Mind you, she was sleeping the whole night in her car seat while driving. Three days later in La Spezia, after taking a walk around the port and marina then had dinner, we were back at the hotel at around 8pm, completely tired. My husband mumbled, "if we didn't have her (referring to babygirl) we'd now totally go out and dance the whole night." I responded with, "really?" to what he said "nah, probably not. I'd go now straight to bed!". Of course, we had a nice hot bath with babygirl and went to bed.

We wasted one whole day to be lazy in the hotel and didn't do lots of things we planned

I made a brief plan before we left. Things we wanted to visit. It was nothing too ambitious, just to make us plan our days easier. But as I might have mentioned a couple of times in my previous posts, with babygirl we're trying our best to travel while catering to her needs and responding to her mood. Our fifth day on the road, which was first day in Florence, she already showed some extra crankiness. She was mostly fine, it was just a combo of fatigue and, I guess, a disappointment because she had to say goodbye to a lovely dog of our friends with whom we stayed in Turin. We had to go further to La Spezia from Turin and the little dog had to fly to Greece with our friends, and babygirl didn't love that. We managed to visit the Duomo, Palazzo Vecchio and Basilica Santa Croce with her, and visited Ufizzi Gallery then strolled along Arno river and crossed Ponte Vecchio while she was napping in the carrier, but she was just nearly impossible to handle at the end of the day. That night instead of having supper at a nice restaurant as we did in the previous days, we decided to have a calm night and ordered pizza to to hotel room. The next day, which was our last day in Florence, she wasn't really in a better mood. After breakfast we decided to "give up" the day -which was meant to visit Palazzo Pitti and Boboli gardens, and just stayed in the hotel. Somewhere during the day she stated she wanted to take a walk, so we just walked along the river next to our hotel, saw some ducks and strolled back to the hotel before checking out and leave.

Don't worry, it's only 2% hard. 98% is fun!

A few years ago, these little things would totally make me upset. Especially things like, I didn't get to visit this Boboli gardens when I was already in Florence?! Who knows when, if ever, would I come back to Florence? Or the thing with the fine in the train, a few years back it would've probably created an argument between my husband and I, like, whose fault that was, why he or I was so careless about it. Now? Nah, we don't have time for arguments and nervous breakdowns. What happens, happens. We stick to that Dalai Lama's "If there's no solution to the problem, don't waste time worrying about it. If there's a solution to the problem, then don't waste time worrying about it". After all, we were 98% having fun during the trip! And believe me, you would, too!