A Brief History of Turin, Italy

Most people know Turin for the Shroud, or FIAT, or the 2006 Winter Olympics. But this northwestern Italian city has a story far more remarkable than these fragments suggest.
A city that has died and been reborn four times.

Founded as a Roman military outpost in 27 BCE, Turin spent a thousand years in medieval obscurity before an exiled dynasty gambled everything on transforming it into their capital.
That gamble succeeded beyond anyone's imagination.
In 1706, a desperate four-month siege against French armies made the House of Savoy into European powers.
In the 1850s, conspirators in Turin's cafés plotted Italian unification over coffee and newspapers. When Italy was proclaimed as a nation in 1861, it happened in Turin-making this Piedmontese city, briefly, the capital of unified Italy.
By 1920, Turin had reinvented itself as Italy's industrial powerhouse. FIAT's factories employed 140,000 workers and produced the automobiles that motorized Italy. But prosperity came with brutal exploitation and class warfare that nearly sparked communist revolution.
By 2000, globalization had devastated Turin's industrial base. The factories stood empty or were converted into shopping malls. The neighborhoods built for workers struggled with unemployment and abandonment.

This book tells Turin's story through the people who lived it:

• A Roman surveyor whose measurements still organize the city's streets.
• A silk merchant surviving the 1706 siege.
• Camillo Cavour orchestrating Italian unification from his favorite café table.
• Factory workers installing car parts twelve hours a day.
• An Auschwitz survivor returning home to rebuild his life.
• An Eritrean refugee cleaning offices in a post-industrial city trying to reinvent itself one more time.

• How a city built to guard Alpine passes became the birthplace of modern Italy
• Why café culture directly influenced Italian political history
• What working FIAT's assembly lines actually felt like during industrial peak
• How factory occupations in 1920 brought Italy to the edge of revolution
• Why southern Italian migrants faced vicious discrimination while building northern prosperity
• What happens to a city when its defining industry vanishes
• How architecture, infrastructure, and memory accumulate across centuries