: Piemonte
Regions of Italy
: Piemonte
Piemonte has nowadays over 4 billion inhabitants. The territory is wide and differentiated: mountains (the Alps), hills (Langhe, Roero, Canavese), flat land (Val Padana). The Alps are massive, rocky and covered in snow: on those sparkling peaks, we know, “leaps the chamois and thunders the avalanche” (Carducci). The scenery of the hills of Langhe and Monferrato is gently melancholic, with its fog, truffles and vinic rarities.
Early populated in the Neolithic Age, later occupied by Celts and Ligures, and eventually colonized by Rome (200 B.C.), Piedmont saw – [Read more...]
Piemonte has nowadays over 4 billion inhabitants. The territory is wide and differentiated: mountains (the Alps), hills (Langhe, Roero, Canavese), flat land (Val Padana). The Alps are massive, rocky and covered in snow: on those sparkling peaks, we know, “leaps the chamois and thunders the avalanche” (Carducci). The scenery of the hills of Langhe and Monferrato is gently melancholic, with its fog, truffles and vinic rarities.
Early populated in the Neolithic Age, later occupied by Celts and Ligures, and eventually colonized by Rome (200 B.C.), Piedmont saw – through turbulent centuries and their alternating vicissitudes – irruptions and rules by various ethnic groups: Burgundians, Gothes, Byzantines, Longobards, Francs. As well as lordship battles, among Viscounts, Hapsburgs and Valois. Eventually, between 17th and 18th century, it started to unite under the lead of Savoy. The process came to an end in the 19th century, by the Risorgimento and the Union of Italy.
Nowadays the region, past a dropping cycle, is back on the run with businesses and initiatives.
Agriculture includes cereals, vegetables as well as grapevines, along with a flourishing oenogastronomy. Prospering and active as always the zootechnics. An excellent production of chocolate, with its everlasting Gianduiotto. The output of the mechanical sector (plastics, paints, tyres), once concentrated in the chief town, has later been throughout decentralized. A brisk financial and banking sector (assurance and credit companies), and a busy tourism.
A remarkable output of wool and textiles in Biella, Novara e Vercelli, a city that holds the European primacy for rice. Cuneo, founded in 1198, is a city with a strong patriotic tradition, with its magnificent town centre. Obviously geographic position and means of communication shape trades and activities of the various towns. Therefore Novara is a satellite of Milan and Lombardy, whereas Asti can be considered inside the area of Turin, whilst Alessandria (birth place of Umberto Eco), risen again after the terrible floods of the 90′s, is affected by the region Liguria.
Torino, or else Augusta Julia Taurinorum of Romans, kept the square and straightforward plant of the “Castrum”, that is the military camp. With its 900,000 inhabitants it is the third Italian city, after Milan and Rome, as for productivity and wealth. Though it was the Capital city during the Risorgimento, with liberal agitations and patriotic pushes: here in 1848 Carlo Alberto issued the Statute, and in those years Piedmont under the Savoy and Cavour did put Italy together.
Turin is a multi-faced city. Sober and weighted in the literary fascination of the 19th century, with ist long avenues covered in trees, monuments, museums and old pastries. Here, in the early nine hundred, were born Eiar and movie industry. The cultured, dignified and bourgeois birth place of Gozzano, Pavese, Primo Levi, Arpino, Calvino. Vivid as always the cultural tradition of the city and region, thanks to its politic and philosophic intellectuals, with liberal (Giolitti, Gobetti, Einaudi) and socialist (Gramsci, Bobbio) members.
On the other hand Turin is an industrial and technological pole, leading actor of the national economic boom in the sixties, it attracted manpower from the south and brought out runabouts for the Italians. Nowadays, after the 2006 Olympic Games, it’s coming out as a dazzling and metropolitan city, dusting away its industrial past in order to praise a mighty touristic-cosmopolitan calling. A workshop for innovative solutions: with an advanced and refined electronic and aerospace industry, the brand new underground, the original Museum of the Cinema which is brilliantly set up inside Antonelli’s Mole. And Fiat itself, after years of economic depression, is back on the run over the world market with new cars and enviable financial plans.
At last, the usual and beloved paramount institutions: the Lingotto (periodically hosting Artissima, the Salone del Libro and Salone del Gusto), the Egyptian Museum, the Museum of the Risorgimento and of the Automobile, the Teatro Regio and Teatro Carignano, as well as Palazzo Reale, with many more monuments and magnificent Savoy residences.
