Torino
Sunday Espresso VIII.
Buona domenica!
I spent two weeks in Torino recently. Like many others, I didn’t go there for sightseeing. I had some medical checkups, and one of the best hospitals in Italy is in Torino. But while I was there, I had the opportunity to experience the city.
I’ll get straight to the point this time: we liked it so much that we are moving there.
See, in Italy, or in any other country that experiences mass tourism, it’s hard to find a place which still belongs to the locals. And unlike other countries, Italy is the worst place to find truly local places. In Spain, you can hide in less popular beach towns or even in cities like Zaragoza or Valencia, which are totally enjoyable as a local. In France, most people converge on Paris, Provence, or the Côte d’Azur. You can still ‘hide’ in Normandy, for example. Some of the Greek islands are still untouched by the Santorini and Mykonos Instagram hype.
In Italy, though, almost the entire country is an open-air museum, and no matter where you are, within a 2-hour drive, you are either on the beach swimming or in the mountains hiking and skiing, on the same day. This country has the most UNESCO sites, the most museums, and the highest concentration of artwork on the planet, and there is the food, which is arguably among the most popular cuisines in the world.
So finding a place which is not flooded by Instagram influencers is kinda challenging. Generally, you have two options.
Option one is a small commune either in the mountains or a quiet beach town that is alive between June and September, and the rest of the year is quiet and local. This is, by the way, our solution. We live in Marina di Pietrasanta. The place is crowded during the summer, empty the rest of the year. The people are gone, but the sea stays, with its food, local events, and everything that the town has to offer anyway. But this is nowhere near a city. For that, we have to drive at least 30 minutes to reach Lucca or Pisa. And they are crowded with tourists mostly year-round anyway, so kinda annoying to go around.
Option two is to find a city that is totally off from tourist maps. It is almost impossible and only a few regional capitals qualify. Torino is a fresh exception.
Torino is a city with all its might and services. Despite it being full of Baroque palazzi and Belle Époque cafés, built when the Savoy monarchs ran their kingdom from here, and laid out with grandiose boulevards, most people think of Torino as a working-class city, sort of like the Detroit of Italy (Fiat/Stellantis is based here).
The city has many layers. The latest is the hipster, foodie, intellectual city with many cultural events and a center of research and innovation. But the best about it is a simple fact: it belongs to the locals. Thankfully, it is overshadowed by its big cousin, Milano, and the Instagram-vultures are flocking to Lake Como and never make it to Torino. And the irony is that the espresso machine itself was patented here in 1884, and Lavazza was founded here too, so the coffee actually came from Torino, not from Como, but who cares about the details on Instagram anyway.
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Torino has everything that you wish for if you live in Italy. The food. The cafés. The proximity to the sea or the mountains. Even the Italian lifestyle is there, even though people in Torino are more reserved than their Southern friends. And you have all that without lines of tourists, people pulling their luggage, selfie sticks, and overpriced local shops that price for tourists, not locals.
So we are moving there soon. I guess this might be the most Italian thing we have ever done since we moved here: live in an underrated Italian city that fully caters to locals, while having a small place by the sea where you can sometimes escape.
A dopo,
Peter
Pietrasanta (for now), 21 June 2026
PS: Expect more from Piemonte and Torino starting September.
New guide about the Arno corridor
The new guide about the Arno corridor is live. We’re doing this a bit unusually. We had a guide on Versilia and the Lunigiana, and now one on the Arno corridor. This is a long stretch from Firenze to the sea, and you can do it in two ways: towards Lucca to reach Versilia, or towards Pisa to reach Livorno. Both viable. The guide covers both.
The next and last guide about Tuscany will cover the mainland, the part that probably comes to mind when you think “Tuscany,” with the cypress streets, winding roads, and Chianti wine. We’ll try to cover it slightly differently from others, though I have to admit it’s kinda hard to show places there that are underrated. :)
Guide | The Arno Corridor
This guide is about the road between Florence and the Tyrrhenian, which most travelers in Tuscany do not consider at all because the famous route from Florence runs the other way, south into the Chianti and the Val d’Orcia and the postcard country. We drive the western road often because it is the one we take when we leave Versilia and turn inland, and after enough trips along it, I have come to think it is the more interesting half of Tuscany, even if no one has built a brand around it.
Our free database and travel planner app launched last week. Our goal is to cover all of the towns in there with this publication, but until we do, browse our hand-selected list of the best truly off-the-beaten-path Italian towns. Based on the database, there is also a travel planner app you can use to plan your next trip. All free.