Overloaded Senses--tastes! sights! color! history! Italy!

Italy will do that to you.

Going straight to Put Yourself in the Way of Beauty

The US news (mostly horrifying) is coming at us with the velocity of a broken water main. A European visit allows me the space to wallow in sensory delights instead, thanks to my son, Ethan. [He and his French wife and their 8 & 10-year-olds live in a village in the foothills of the Alps near Annecy.] It was spring break, so we headed by car to Turin & Alba, Italy in the Piedmont region.

BEAUTIFUL FOOD! Gnocchi with a mushroom-truffle sauce. Flaky croissants filled with pastry cream—kill me now. A cup of breakfast chocolate is closer to a cup of melted fudge frosting than it is to the milky mess we call cocoa. Sometimes it’s so thick and rich you eat it with a spoon. The kids went nuts for it.

We went into a lot of baroque churches. Here’s the ornate interior of the tiny Santa Chiara church from 1750 in the hill town of Bra. I mean…

SOME GOOD NEWS—POPE LEO XIV! I wish I’d been a fly on the wall during the conclave to select the next pope. I wish we’d been in Italy when the white smoke puffed from the Vatican, but it happened a week later. Many Americans, like me, are thrilled he disapproves of the Trump administration’s cruel anti-immigration pro-billionaire policies.

Turin has the most important museum of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt, Museo Egizio. My grandson Jak wanted to see the mummies. I was fascinated by what passed for a bed and pillow back then. How….???

They pounded the heck out of various minerals to create the colors used to decorate pottery and sarcophagi (sarcophaguses?). This is just the cooler end… there were ochres, reds, browns. Eye candy for a color fanatic like me.

Outside Turin, the former ginormous Fiat factory has been transformed into a combination shopping mall, Fiat history museum, and modern art gallery. Topping the building is a race track where they once tested cars, with an impressive spiral driveway to get the cars up and down. Now the track is a kind of oval High Line park, landscaped with native plants, and offering views of the Alps in the distance.

The art gallery had a show by Salvo, a prolific Italian artist (1947-2015) I’d never heard of—we were intrigued by his experimental use of color and form, and how he mixed stylized elements, light, weather, time of day to created different effects.

In the Fiat history part of the museum were photos of car models going back more than a hundred years. [FIAT = Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino] I enjoyed how their advertisements changed over the decades. This is from 1925:

I’ll close with a Roman ruin in the town of Aosta:

And the hopeful installation on top of the Fiat factory:

Coming next: LONDON

I hope you appreciated this break from news of The Man Who Wishes He Were Pope (as well as King, Emperor, Lord High Muckity-Muck, and Ruler of the Not-Free World).

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