Turin has two sides, we told you last week, and if that was news to you, you may be as surprised to hear that this binary character is also reflected in the city’s topography.
Two rivers are crossing Turin, one is wide and luminous, an integral part of the townscape – it passes Piazza Veneto on the southern flank of the city centre – and known by name even to people who have never visited Italy: that is the Po.
The other river is in town, narrow and twisted, associated with the city’s darker side and historically cast as the antagonist to the Po, the Child of the Sun.
Meet the Dora, Turin’s Moon River
On today’s two-river walk, we will meet both Po and Dora and, what’s more, see these two rivers in a somewhat unfamiliar light. We will find out that the Moon River has a bright and scenic side, too – and that the Child of the Sun also has some darker tales to tell.
We start at the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele from where we set off following the Po downstream on its western bank.
Down this stretch, the left bank of the river is lined by the so-called Murazzi: an embankment that was built gradually from the 1830s onwards to stabilize the river and to prevent flooding. And for most of this period, the arches inside the walls were used by local fishermen as storage places for their boats and their equipment.
In Italy’s industrial Golden Age after WWII, however, the river quickly became polluted, the fish disappeared, and so, eventually, did the fishermen. The old-style Murazzi quarter – a lively hub of fishermen, washerwomen, boatmen and layabouts – was dead, but, as so often in life, what is misfortune for one is opportunity for someone else.
With the disappearance of the working-class Murazzi, the scene was set for the quarter’s rebirth as a hub for free spirits, left-wing students and budding artists.
Hippies from Goa started it all when they established the legendary Doctor Sax hangout in one of the Murazzi’s arches. What was first just a place where young people could meet to exchange stories about their adventures and experiences soon became a commercial nightclub.
This was in 1979, and in the years after that, bar followed dancing hall followed restaurant, and the Murazzi became Turin’s number one party mile, attracting young people not only from the region but from all over the continent.
For a while, the Murazzi was “Turin’s most famous place in Europe”, but eventually, what had originally been a haven for the city’s flower children …
… developed a much darker side. In his award-winning collection of short stories “The War of the Murazzi”, Enrico Remmert – formerly a bartender in one of the party mile’s clubs – remembers:
At a certain point a war broke out in that place, not in the daylight but by moonlight, and I’m talking about those years when you could still drive down onto the banks and when the North Africans had started invading them and, after a certain time of the day, down at the Murazzi you could only hear the drug dealers yelling and only smell the stinking smoke from the barbecues and there were fights every day and every night ended with people being hurt, and some nights ended with people being seriously hurt and some nights ended with someone dead, even if no one seems to remember any more.
At which stage the municipal government intervened and shut the entire riverfront circus down.
The Murazzi arches were closed and bricked-up, …
… and the once so lively area fell into a deep sleep.
But lately, the Sleeping Beauty appears to be stirring in her slumber. Ironically, the “Kiss of New Life” was given by the same people who had, a decade earlier, been responsible for putting the Murazzi into its deep coma.
But a few years ago, Turin’s municipal government decided to revive the area under a new formula, with elegant bars and restaurants meant to replace raucous nightspots. The first new Murazzi establishments have since opened their doors and appear to be targeted at a different clientele from the one that once made the quarter both famous and notorious.
We suggest to follow the Po downstream from the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele to the next bridge (the Regina Margharita) where the Murazzi end.
Continue straight for 500 metres on the riverbank sidewalk and then turn left into Via Benevento. Follow this street for another 500 metres before crossing Corso Belgio.
On the far side of this busy street, turn right into the Lungo Dora Righera: the riverside promenade of Turin’s Moon River which now flows gently on your left hand side.
Cross the river at the Ponte Washington and turn right into the tree-lined alley …
… to follow the course of the Dora for a while.
This is the bright side of a river so often associated with the dark: spacious, airy and scenic – particularly down the grassy meadows that lie a little further to your left hand side.
Turin lies at the feet of some of Europe’s highest mountains, and although you can see them from many places in town, here, where these views are embedded in a more natural environment, these snow-capped peaks feel much closer.
Soon, you will reach the spot where the Dora flows into the Po. This – as the legend has it – is the place where Turin was established in ancient times, more than 1000 years before the birth of Christ, after the Egyptian goddess Isis had asked a travelling prince to lay the foundations of a new city right where the sun river and the moon river met.
You may not be surprised to hear that archaeologists do not agree with this version of the story. According to them, the city was established as a Roman colony (Augusta Taurinorum) in the late 1st century BC.
If you want to, you can round off your day with a trip to the Roman ruins near Piazza Castello in the town centre (tramway 15 will take you there from the near-by stop at Chieti) to decide which of the foundation myths you like better.
We, at any rate, have already made our decision: we prefer the version that features the Moon River, our huckleberry friend. After all, the Easy Hikers, two drifters off to see the world (and there’s a lot of world to see: otherwise, we would not be reporting to you every week), are aiming for the same rainbow’s end, waiting round the bend.
The rainbow’s end – maybe both we and the Moon River will find it one day.
