Turin is a beautiful city but almost everything has an entry fee, and several of the main attractions are expensive. Like many cities they offer a card that gets you into multiple sites. The 24-hour version limits you to three free entries, so we opted for the 72-hour card with unlimited entries and a cost of 46€. Leandra exhaustively checked each option on the Torino+Piemonte Card and made sure we got our money’s worth! Altogether we visited seven different sites:
Venaria Palace (separate post)
Royal Museums of Turin (15€) – The rooms in this former palace are the definition of ornate, with lots of carvings, paintings, massive chandeliers, and gold accents on everything.
The private chapel for the shroud of Turin was a surprise, we didn’t know it was directly connected to the main cathedral, plus it’s a beautiful space.
As a second surprise, the attached art museum was surprisingly good with lots of variety, not just iconography! Although Leandra loves to hunt for St. Peter and his giant keys, there seems to be one in any large museum!
The archeology section was less interesting, and we were now getting hungry, so we checked out the Roman theater and left through the gardens.
Egyptian Museum (18€) – massive and extensive, with so many artifacts, it gets overwhelming pretty quickly. There is a lot of information on each piece, with descriptions on who/where/when it was found. We didn’t realize that so many funeral pieces were made from wood, since most of the ones we’ve seen in other museums are stone.
Museo Nazionale del Cinema (16€) – located in the Mole Antonelliana, you start in a dark, crowded corridor lined with old cameras, antique peep show reels, magic lanterns and other pre-cinema paraphernalia.
After the history and artifacts, you walk up a floor to a huge atrium. Across several floors are exhibits on film-making, movie posters, and a slightly odd VR movie experience.
Palazzo Madama (10€) – We had an hour before closing, so we stopped in quickly to check out some of the rooms. We started in the special violin exhibit featuring Stradivarius and other famous makers.
We skipped the iconography section, and went up the stairs to the decorated rooms on the second floor. As with the Royal Museums of Turin, the rooms featured lots of ornate gold plus inlay furniture. The museum was also featuring a Tintoretto and Emilio Vedova special exhibit and had a hidden garden space in the former moat.
The top floor was all porcelain and textiles, but the tower provided for some nice views of the Piazzetta Reale.
CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia (13€) – The Lee Miller exhibition was really well done and gave us an appreciation for her artistry. Standouts were shots of friends and her WW2 photos. We definitely would not have paid for this museum on its own, so we are glad the card allowed us to try it.
Museum of Fruit Francesco Garnier Valetti (Museo della Frutta) (5€) – A small museum focused on scientific fruit models? Sure! There are hundreds of varieties of fruit (apples, pears, etc) that are very lifelike – some even had models of progressive diseases.
Altogether we totaled 102€ worth of admissions on the 46€ card. You can bundle the card with transit access for an extra 9€, but we found Turin easy enough to navigate on foot, so we skipped this option.