City breaks are one of the easiest ways to escape from your normal routine. In just a few hours you can be in Europe. We have been on quite a few now, Paris, Barcelona, Rome and now Turin.
Turin in the North West of Italy is just under 2 hours flying time from Gatwick. We visited Turin at the end of September 2019 for a friends wedding. The wedding was on a Friday so we decided to make a long weekend of it and enjoy the city.
This was our second long weekend in Italy, the first being Rome. I didn’t know much about Turin before we went, but I would definitely go back. It was less touristy than Rome but there was a lot of things to do and see. As we were travelling with friends we decided to stay in an Airbnb which was right on the main square – Piazza Castello. It was a little noisey at night due to trams but I soon got used to it. We couldn’t have found a better apartment, it was beautifully decorated and a great location.
We arrived on the Thursday night and found a great pizza restaurant just around the corner from our apartment. Friday was spent at the wedding which meant we had the whole of Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning to explore the city. If you are a fan of museums then Turin is the city for you. There a quite a few, but I can really recommend checking out the Egyptian Museum. It is the largest museum outside of Cairo that is exclusively dedicated to Egyptian art and culture. The cinema museum also came highly recommended however we ran out of time, as the queue was always really long.
We basically spent 4 days trying to eat and drink as much as we could and I think we succeeded.
One of the things that Turin is known for is bicerin. A drink made of espresso, chocolate, milk, and served in a small rounded glass. I don’t actually drink coffee so I decided to go for a hot chocolate instead. Our apartment was situated above Caffè Mulassano which turns out is the best place to go for this. Well the hot chocolate was basically a small cup of melted thick chocolate. It was more like a pudding than a drink! But it was the nicest chocolate I have ever tasted!
On Monday morning before we headed back to the airport we wandered around and took some photos. We came across some ruins and I was really surprised they weren’t fenced off and you could actually get up close to them. In Rome everywhere had fences or security around it. These ones you could walk under.
Have you ever been to Turin? Or Italy? We are lucky that we live quite close to Gatwick which means city breaks are easy for us to do.