Turin

The single strongest reason to come. The Museo Egizio holds the most important collection of Egyptian material outside Cairo, built over two centuries and displayed in a building given over entirely to it. The scale is what surprises: a gallery of monumental statuary, an intact tomb group with its contents assembled as found, papyri including a famous map, and rooms of everyday objects that do more to explain the civilisation than the monuments do. Allow three hours minimum and book a timed slot in advance, particularly at weekends. The labelling is bilingual and the audio guide is worth taking.

Turin's defining feature at street level is its porticoes: roughly eighteen kilometres of covered arcade lining the main streets, built so the court could cross the city without weather. The practical effect for a visitor is that this is the one major Italian city where rain does not ruin a day — you can walk from the station to the river almost entirely under cover. Via Roma, Via Po and Piazza Vittorio Veneto are the grand stretches, and the arcades are where the historic cafés, bookshops and chocolate houses sit.

The Mole Antonelliana is the city's emblem, a startlingly tall brick structure that was never quite what its builder intended and now houses the National Cinema Museum. The museum uses the interior brilliantly, spiralling exhibits up the walls of the vast central hall with seats and screens set out below. A glass lift runs up the middle to a viewing platform, and on a clear day the Alps stand along the horizon behind the roofs. Book the lift separately and go late in the afternoon for the light.

Aperitivo as an institution began here. Vermouth was created in Turin in the eighteenth century, and the ritual that grew around it — a drink in the early evening with a spread of food that in this city is generous enough to replace dinner — remains a genuine local habit rather than a tourist offer. The historic cafés along Via Po, on Piazza San Carlo and around Piazza Castello serve it in rooms of mirrors, marble and wood that have barely changed; bicerin, the layered coffee, chocolate and cream drink, is the other thing to order in them.

The centre holds a dense group of former royal buildings — the Palazzo Reale and its armoury, the Palazzo Madama on Piazza Castello, and several country residences in the surrounding hills — collectively UNESCO-listed and impressive as baroque architecture whatever your interest in their history. Beside the Palazzo Reale stands the cathedral, which holds the famous linen relic. The practical point for visitors: it is almost never on public display, exhibitions are rare and announced years apart, and what you can see day to day is the chapel and the museum devoted to it nearby.

Turin was Italy's industrial capital and the most interesting relic of that is the Lingotto, a former car factory built as a vertical production line with a test track on the roof. It has been converted into a complex of shops, cinemas and a concert hall, and the banked rooftop track survives as a public garden you can walk. In the same building, a small but genuinely excellent gallery holds a private collection with a handful of major paintings. It is a short metro ride south of the centre and pairs well with the Automobile Museum nearby.

Piedmont is one of Italy's serious eating regions and Turin is its front door. Look for vitello tonnato, agnolotti del plin, bagna cauda in the colder months, and the tajarin pasta that carries white truffle in autumn. Gianduja — the hazelnut-chocolate paste invented here — appears as gianduiotti in every confectioner. An hour south, the Langhe hills produce Barolo and Barbaresco and are among the most rewarding wine country in Europe, easily done as a day trip with a driver or as an overnight from the city.

Turin is on the high-speed line, under an hour from Milan and around four from Rome, with its own airport and good connections to French and Swiss cities across the Alps. In town, a small metro plus trams and buses covers everything, and the centre is flat and walkable under those arcades. Autumn is the finest season — truffle and wine, clear days, the Alps sharp on the horizon — and spring is close behind. Winter is cold and often foggy, which is exactly when the museums and mirrored cafés earn their keep. August is hot and quiet, with many places closed.