My trek along Turin’s palaces started badly. I arrived at the Palazzo Reale at its opening hour of 8.30 a.m., but was not able to enter because the ticket office could not give me change back. A 50 EUR note proved to be too large to pay a 10 EUR entrance fee. They don’t accept debit or credit cards either, so I was sent away to try and change at the coffee shop. Which also would not let me. After that, I was fed up with the unfriendly welcome, and decided to boycott the place. If you see a foreign tourist coming in through thick snow, can´t you just make it work somehow?

Things brightened up considerably when I entered the hallway of the nearby Palazzo Madama. It has a fabulous staircase, which is free to enter. It gave me the first (and last) wow!-moment of this WHS. A bit further south lies the Palazzo Carignano. This has a full brick façade, pretty remarkable. The main courtyard is totally made out of brick too.

Finally, I entered the Palazzo Madama, where the entrance costs another 10 EUR. Exhibitions cover 4 floors of this historical building, which is an extension of a medieval castle. Most of the interior is pretty plain, especially compared to the magnificent Juvarra staircase downstairs. The walls are covered by art from late medieval times to renaissance and baroque. Captions are in Italian only, though it is not very hard to understand the omnipresent ´Madonna col bambino´.

The palaces of Turin were entered in the WH list because they are as representative of the Ancien Regime as those in France and Germany. The Savoy dynasty also had strong relations with courts all over Europe. So it´s no wonder I got the feeling that I had seen it all before. Wurzburg Residence for example is quite similar.

Turin in general is not one of Italy’s great historic cities, although it was its first capital and it has always been quite prosperous. Probably due to the cold, it looked quite rough around the edges with many homeless people hiding under the city's arcaded walkways. The city center has a “consistent baroque architecture”, which I found quite boring and grey. It is worth visiting though for its museums: I very much enjoyed the Egyptian Museum, with a collection of Egyptian objects both in quantity and quality that I had never encountered before. The nearby Cinema Museum is said to be good too.