The first thing I do when I book a trip is I plan to do a food tour. One needs to eat so you might as well eat well. If you book this first thing then you have lots of ideas of where to get food for your whole trip.
All food tours aren’t equal so choose wisely. If in Turin, choose the Street food tour from I eat tours. For hours we walked around the city, in and out of shops and restaurants, tasting more local classics that I could ever list here. I’ll let you walk through parts of the tour through these photos.
There were many highlights. One was most definitely the Mercato Centrale Torino considered to be one of the largest in Europe. It is a celebration of food, what a market should be. Smack in the middle of the community it has it all from fresh produce to any cheese you could ever imagine wanting to try. There is an outdoor area but also a large 4,500 square metre indoor space.
Towards the end of an amazing day of eating and walking we ended up in Galleria San Federico. You know when you are in a city and you turn down a random alleyway and find yourself in a spectacular spot you never realised existed. Well, that’s pretty much common practice in many European cities (not always granted), but Turin has a lot of these moments and Galleria San Federico is one. Build in 1933, this used to be the home of La Stampa newspaper, an Italian daily still in circulation today that is also still headquartered in Turin. Apparently, the Galleria used to be filled with beautiful coffee shops to sustain the journalists (coffee was for journalists and hot chocolate for the intellectuals). All the coffee shops are gone now, replaced with clothing stores. There is one small more modern addition that serves a hot chocolate where we stopped as part of the tour: Mondello.
Mondello is an excellent ice-cream shop, but they also serve a range of desserts and a thick hot chocolate. This one was served in a clear glass, sprinkled with crunchy chocolate pieces, and topped with clouds of panna (whipping cream). I know I should be talking about the hot chocolate but there is just something about how the Italians make their panna. Whip cream is only something I crave and enjoy eating by the spoonful when I’m in Italy. They must add human catnip into it…or something because it isn’t sugar (all the panna I had on this trip was unsweetened). Must be the cows. I’m tempted to start a new blog celebrating Italian panna. I’ll keep you updated.
This Galleria also houses what was once Turin’s largest cinema (Lux) with 1,336 seats. Sadly, perhaps, it has been renovated and is now a modern cinema but it stayed pretty much in its original condition from 1913 until 2005.
Verdict: Mondello, Via Roma et Via Santa Teresa, Turin, Italy
