Un Giro D’Italia – Parte Uno

So I have finally got around to developing and scanning in ALL the images I took when I travelled around Italy in November last year, so welcome to part one of “Un Giro D’Italia” (A trip around Italy).

I arrived in Italy on a Friday evening, Torino Airport to be exact, and spent the next two hours trying to get from the airport to my hostel. There was a few reasons for this taking so long, firstly; Torino Airport is bloody miles away from the centre of the city and there was a train only once every half hour or so. Secondly once I did catch a train to the city, the station it stopped at happened to be on the opposite side of the city to where I wanted to be (massive miscalculation on my part). Thirdly when I got to that station and asked about the bus that I needed to take to get to the metro station I was told “The driver has not turned up today”, so that meant a rather long and brisk walk across an unfamiliar city on Autumn night. And Finally once I reached said metro station I was accosted by the Carabinieri who wanted to inspect my “papers”, I must’ve resembled some dodgy bastard or something. Thankfully once they’d checked my passport, seen where I was from, and in my best broken Italian told them “Io Sono Gallese”, they smiled, handed me it back and wished me a nice evening. That was my first experience of friendly Italians of this trip, and certainly not the last either. After a short metro ride I finally arrived at the hostel I would be staying at for the next few days, it was around 10pm by now and other than confusing a poor Spanish girl on arrival, I spent the rest of the night planing the first full day’s activities.

The next morning I caught a metro a few stops to go and visit the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile (above), and spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon there. This was one of the main attractions in Torino I had planned to visit and it didn’t disappoint at all, I have never seen so many Alfa’s, Ferrari’s, Lamborghini’s and other beautiful cars in one place. A museum I can recommend for both the cars and the fantastic music that plays at various points, I still have a video of I shared on Instagram of an Alfa while funky 60’s Italian pop music blats out in the background.

Of course there wasn’t just road cars, but an incredible collection of racing cars also.

After I left the museum I decided to take a walk back towards my hostel, a decision that felt smart at the time until I realised an hour and a half into the walk that it was at least 7 km away! One good thing from this was that I walked back along the Po River and got to experience the beautiful Autumn colours of the trees and park I walked through. My feet hurt by the end but the squirrels were friendly and I stumbled across a Rowing regatta of some kind and stopped to watch.

To finish off the day I had a cheap and cheerful dinner and a few drinks while watching football in a bar with a Canadian guy who I later abandoned (I do things like that when I drink too much).

Across my first day I managed to burn through a whole roll and a half of 35mm film and a single roll of 120, as you can probably tell from the amount of images in this piece. The next day I’d be going to visit another museum and hopefully see the Turin Shroud, I’ll share images from that day shortly.

All images today were made on my Olympus OM-1 on Fuji Superia 200 film. If you’d like to see more of my images from this trip then you can purchase a copy of my photo zine that is for sale through my Etsy Store.