Turin
is Italy's motor city. It is where FIAT is based and since FIAT now
owns every brand in Italian car making Turin is the epicentre of all
the countries car making. Naturally Turin has a motor museum, a
museum we had visited in 1992. Back then it was a straightforward
gallery of cars lined up in rows in a plain white interior. Now the
whole place had been completely reconstructed and the museum rebuilt
with more a more thematic approach. As is the fashion in many
exhibition spaces these days the suggested visiting route began with
an escalator ride to the top floor and continued down the stairs. The
first gallery began right at the beginning and had an interesting
wall of models; models of the most notable attempts to make an
'autonomous carriage' (for wont of a better phrase) before the
invention of the internal combustion engine.
The
rest of the floor was given over to a chronological development of
(mostly Italian) cars; from the earliest types, through the grand
Rolls Royces of the 1920s, to the golden age of the Italian
coachbuilders in 1950s and 60s. Not a whole lot different from the
Mulhouse collection except that the Italians had not put their cars
on plinths or kept them at a slight distance; it makes a world of
difference being able to walk right up to the cars and peer inside.
Looking at rows of neatly parked cars from the front is like looking
at neatly hung paintings from behind a rope. It gets a bit boring and
repetitive after a while, and all the details that only appear with a
close look are missed.
Not
even the Italians were prepared to allow visitors to breathe all over
the racing cars though. In the lower level the collection of
Ferraris, Maseratis and the others were laid out exactly as they had
been at Mulhouse; on a dummy starting grid display. The second floor
was dedicated to Turin's part in all this. In the staircase lobby
were four of the finest models from FIAT and Alfa Romeo. Then, just
to remind the visitor that once up a time there were many others, the
next room housed respectively a Temperino, a Storero, a SCAT Ceirano
and a FOD. I had never heard of any of these marques before, possibly
because they were all consigned to history by the 1940s. FOD only
ever made one model. The same room also had a giant aerial photograph
of the city set in the floor with labels pointing out all of the car
factories and other companies involved in Turin throughout the years.
There was barely a district that didn't have something automotive as
it's industrial centrepiece.
Down
on the ground floor was a gallery of Turin's finest designs. What
Turin regarded as it's finest designs anyway, and it was surprisingly
up to date with concept cars from this year. This explains why
museums have taken to having this upside down arrangement with new
and temporary exhibitions on the ground floor and the old things
upstairs - it's much easier to swap things around in the evening if
they are on the ground floor. Turin wasn't just where the cars were
built but where they were styled too - in the workshops and studios
of Italdesign, Pininfarina, Bertone, and others. And not just Italian
cars either, most of the rest of the world's most stylish and notable
cars were fashioned here. The final rooms of the exhibition were
given over to a video of the personal musings of car designers and
small cases holding their inspirations and other favoured designs.
Most of them had picked the 1955 Citroen DS as their all-time number
one - perhaps a sign of modesty as none of them had anything to do
with it. The very very last room housed a small line up of cars
without much comment - I assumed we were to infer that these were the
very cream of the crop, or the museum's parting comment to us the
visitor - an Alfa Giulietta, an Abarth saloon, a 'Disco volante' Alfa
(so called because it looks a bit like a wheeled pancake) a white
Cisitalia fastback, a Ferrari GTB. Nothing too showy, but all in
their subtle way exceptionally fine designs.
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