The flibco puts you down in Piazza Carlo Felice, the square in front of the station, not in the station hall. Walk out of the square to the north and Via Roma starts straight ahead.

You have landed in the first capital of unified Italy, 1861 to 1865. That is why the city in front of you looks like Paris rather than Tuscany: boulevards, symmetrical baroque squares, and twelve continuous kilometres of arcade, built so the House of Savoy could cross town without getting wet.

Straight north up Via Roma under the arcades. Piazza San Carlo is the halfway point and it is called the drawing room of Turin: twin baroque churches at the south end, arcades down both sides, historic cafés under them.

Caffè Torino, at number 204 on the west arcade, has been trading since 1903 and serves the bicerin — espresso, drinking chocolate and cream in a glass, invented in this city and poured here since 1763.

The largest Egyptian collection in the world outside Cairo, and the oldest anywhere — founded 1824. It exists because Bernardino Drovetti, a Piedmontese, was Napoleon’s consul in Egypt and sold his collection to the Savoys.

⚡ This is a highlights visit, deliberately. The museum’s own stated average is 2h30 and the day used to give it that. It now gets 90 minutes, which buys back an hour for the Duomo interior, the Roman gate and Porta Palazzo. Walk in knowing what you came for.

Three things, in this order. The tomb of Kha and Merit — an ordinary couple from Deir el-Medina, found intact in 1906 because robbers never located it: furniture, clothes, cosmetics, board games, food. The closest you will get to an actual life 3,400 years ago instead of a king’s propaganda. Then the Gallery of Kings, colossi staged in a dark mirrored hall. Then walk the rest at pace.

⚡ Two minutes from the museum door, straight across the street, and almost nobody who does the Egizio bothers to turn round and look at it.

Palazzo Carignano is where modern Italy was actually invented. Vittorio Emanuele II was born in it, and the first parliament of the Kingdom of Italy sat in it from 1861. Guarini’s façade is the thing to look at: a curved, rippling brick front from the 1670s, which is baroque doing something brick is not supposed to do.

Then cut through the Galleria Subalpina on the far side of Piazza Castello — an 1874 glass-roofed arcade of cafés and bookshops, and one of the handsomest rooms in the city that you can walk through for nothing.

The royal core. Both palaces are UNESCO-listed Savoy residences and both are instant from the outside.

Madama is the odd one: a medieval castle with a full baroque palace façade bolted onto its front. It tells you everything about how this city rebuilds itself.

⚡ It has no façade — this photograph IS the church. That flat palace front with the one plain dark door is it, and the dome is hidden behind and above, which is why almost everyone walks straight past the highest-rated thing in the city centre. Look for exactly this on the west side of Piazza Castello, near the corner with Palazzo Madama.

Then look up. Guarino Guarini, 1668–1680. Eight stone ribs cross each other in mid-air to form an open star, and the daylight comes through the gaps between the ribs rather than from a lantern. It has no business standing up, and it is the most inventive piece of engineering in Italian baroque.

⚡ This is what the hour cut from the museum bought. The old plan reached the Duomo at 12:50, twenty minutes after it shuts, so it was a façade stop. At 12:10 you can walk in.

Turin’s ONLY Renaissance church (1491–98), built by Meo del Caprino, a Florentine imported to make the one thing this otherwise entirely baroque city has from that century. Guarini’s dome rises behind it, the campanile stands beside it. After a morning of gold and structural showing-off, the plain white interior is the point: this is what came before Turin got rich.

Three minutes north of the Duomo and suddenly it is the first century BC. The Porta Palatina is one of the best-preserved Roman city gates anywhere in the world: two sixteen-sided towers, thirty metres high, and the original four-arch gate between them.

You are standing at the north gate of Julia Augusta Taurinorum, and the streets behind you are still on its grid. That is what the Quadrilatero Romano is — not a neighbourhood name someone invented for tourists, but the actual Roman street plan, now the bar and restaurant quarter.

⚡ This is the stop that did not exist before today, and it is the reason the museum was cut. Porta Palazzo is the largest open-air market in Europe — several hundred stalls across Piazza della Repubblica, running every weekday morning. On a Thursday it is still going at 13:00 and winding down by 14:00, so you are catching the end of it, which is when the prices move.

Then go inside. Mercato Centrale Torino, Piazza della Repubblica 25, is a food hall of independent artisan counters under one roof with shared seating in the middle — bakers, a pasta counter, pizza, fish, a butcher, coffee. Eat here.

🍴 What to actually look at, for Fitchen. This is the format the trip was supposed to study and could not: Eataly Lingotto is half an hour each way, and Turin’s aperitivo does not switch on until 18:00, an hour after your bus. Mercato Centrale is the same idea and it is open now. One roof, one identity, one shared seating area, many independent counters, no waiters. Look at how the counters are laid out relative to the seating, how ordering and paying work when there is no table service, how the shared tables are turned over at peak, and what a bowl or a plate costs against what the same thing costs on Via Roma.

167 metres, begun in 1863 as a synagogue, abandoned by the Jewish community when it overran its budget, finished by the city. Once the tallest brick building in the world, and still the thing on the Italian two-cent coin.

Inside is the Museo Nazionale del Cinema: a spiral ramp winding around a vast hall with loungers where you lie back and watch film projected overhead. Then a glass lift straight up the void to an 85-metre terrace — the Po, the hills, Superga and the Alps standing behind the city, in one look.

Do both halves. The museum is not a corridor to the lift.

⚡ This was cut from the plan for time and then earned back. Four minutes east of the Mole, straight down Via Po. You see it from the panoramic lift; this is standing in it.

One of the largest squares in Europe, and it slopes down to the river — the one place Turin stops being a grid and opens up. It frames Gran Madre di Dio on the far bank on purpose: a copy of the Pantheon, built in 1814 to thank God for the Savoys getting their throne back after Napoleon. Behind it the hill, and Monte dei Cappuccini on the skyline to the right.

⚡ Almost free — it sits practically on the straight line from the Mole to the station, so this costs you the ten minutes you spend standing in it and nothing in walking.

Piazza Carlo Emanuele II, always called Piazza Carlina, is the student and young-professional square, and it is where Turin’s fast-casual chains put their flagships. Poke House at Via Santa Croce 2 is the one to look at: founded Milan 2018, now the biggest poke chain in Europe, and the closest thing in Italy to what Fitchen does.

🍴 Five minutes of looking, standing outside. How is the build-your-own flow signed? How many people are in the queue at 16:00, which is dead time? What is the base price and what do the add-ons cost? Is it eat-in, takeaway or delivery-first? That is a competitor read you cannot get from a website.

⚡ Buy here, at the END of the day, not this morning. It is 29° and chocolate carried for eight hours is ruined. This shop sits on the walk to the coach, so it costs nothing.

Turin invented gianduja — chocolate stretched with Piedmont hazelnuts when the Napoleonic blockade made cocoa scarce. It is the ancestor of Nutella, and it covers almost the whole list from one family.

From Piazza Carlina it is about fifteen minutes: west to Via Roma, then south under the arcades through Piazza San Carlo to Piazza Carlo Felice.

Arcaded almost the whole way, which at 29° is the entire point. You will have walked about five and a half kilometres today and barely noticed, because most of it was under a roof.