EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

"Do you know Turin?" asked Nietzsche. "It is a city after my own heart & a princely residence of the seventeenth century, which has only one taste giving commands to everything, the court and its nobility. Aristocratic calm is preserved in everything; there are no nasty suburbs." Although TURIN 's traffic-choked streets are no longer calm, and its suburbs are as dreary as any in Italy, the city centre's gracious Baroque thoroughfares, opulent palaces, sumptuous churches and splendid collections of Egyptian antiquities and northern European paintings are still there - a pleasant surprise to those who might have been expecting satanic factories and little else.

Turin's suburbs were built by a new dynasty, Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino), whose owner, Gianni Agnelli, is reckoned to be the most powerful man in Italy. Although the only sign of Agnelli's power appears to be the number of Fiats that cram Turin's streets (as they do those of every other Italian city), it's worth remembering that Fiat owns Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Autobianchi and Ferrari too, accounting for more than sixty percent of the Italian car market. But there are other, more hidden branches of the Agnelli empire. Stop for a Cinzano in one of the city's many fin de siècle cafés and you're drinking an Agnelli vermouth; buy the La Stampa or Corriere della Sera newspapers and you're reading newsprint produced by the Agnelli family. Support the Juventus football team and you're supporting the Agnellis who own it; or go for a Club Med skiing holiday at the nearby resort of Sestriere and you'll sleep in hotels built by Agnelli's grandfather. Wielding such power, Agnelli and friends are seen as a political force in a country where governments are relatively transient. Foreign governments often take more notice of Agnelli than they do of Italy's elected leaders: as Henry Kissinger once said, Gianni Agnelli "is the permanent establishment". Terrorists too recognized where the roots of Italian power lay: the Red Brigade was founded on the factory floors of Fiat, and Fiat executives were as much targets as were politicians.