Turin, La Francese's first time

Friday, Saturday and Sunday. One whole day (Saturday) and two halves. Five hours by train for the Francese to get there. Far fewer for me. Two long nights just for us. Turin is the city of my university years, the metropolis that overturns the habits of provincial life, the Great Suggestion for a twenty-year-old raised within the limited horizon of a small town. But a reserved and discreet metropolis, until the last decade, resigned to a post-industrial drift it didn't know how to escape. I remember the winter evenings on its boulevards abandoned to the rule of cars doing eighty, the zombies sucking wine from cartons lurching along the pavements of Via Nizza, the arcades emptying after eight, the only lively corners those claimed by the cheerful calls of pushers or by the antagonism of the squatters' underground culture.

I remember the trams leaving Mirafiori at the end of a shift, those faces pressed against the window by the weight of eight hours of work. I remember a Turin like that. A city that today seems no longer to exist, erased by years of urban renewal, cultural relaunch, injections of optimism, capital investment and moral restoration. The depressed Turin of the Nineties no longer exists, or rather, it has merely hidden beneath a thick layer of skilful make-up. Turin is a capital of culture, home to a University and the Polytechnic, the city of the book and its Fair, of the Egyptian Museum, of the glittering Palazzo Madama, of the Gallery of modern and contemporary art, of the 2006 Winter Olympics, that great final surge that placed the city on the international tourist circuit. My weekly appointment with the Francese could not fail to reach here too.

At one o'clock I'm on the esplanade of kiosks, newsstands and bars right by the tracks of Porta Nuova Station. I find her leafing through newspapers in front of a magazine rack, my Francese, foiling my attempt to surprise her from behind and kiss her neck before she notices my arrival. Tucked into her quilted canvas jacket, fastened with metal frogging. No hat, no glasses. She shows me the architecture books that weigh down her bag, reels off her knowledge of Juvarra, Guarini, the late-nineteenth-century Liberty style, between one kiss and another, inside a long embrace. And off we go, my backpack and her holdall with me, her hand in mine, my gaze in hers, lips on lips, across the great atrium and finally outside, into the light of Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

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