Turin has a palace whose front is bent like a sail, and it is the sort of building that makes architecture students go quiet. Palazzo Carignano was designed by Guarino Guarini, a priest, mathematician and architect, and completed in the late seventeenth century. Its brick facade swells outward in a great curve, with decoration pressed into the clay in patterns, and the building seems to breathe. Guarini was one of the great figures of the baroque, and his work in Turin, including the chapel that holds the Holy Shroud, is some of the most daring in Italy.
The palace is also important for what happened inside. The Carignano branch of the House of Savoy lived here, and in 1820 Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a unified Italy, was born in its rooms. In 1848 the building housed the parliament of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and in 1861 it hosted the first parliament of the newly united Italy, when Turin was the capital of the new state. Today it holds the National Museum of the Risorgimento, which tells the story of Italian unification, in rooms that are as much part of the exhibit as the objects.
The palace stands in the middle of Turin, a city of arcades, long straight avenues and cafés that have been serving coffee since the eighteenth century. At the Consolata, a short walk away, you can try a bicerin, a layered drink of espresso, chocolate and cream that is a local institution. Turin is also the city of vermouth, of the Egyptian Museum, which holds the biggest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Cairo, and of football.
For motorcyclists the city centre is a place to park and walk. Turin has restricted traffic zones, called ZTL, which may fine you if you enter without permission, and the arcaded streets are lovely on foot. The best rides start at the edge of the city, up the hills toward Superga or out toward the Alps, only half an hour away.
Fuel is easy to find on the ring road and the outskirts. Book parking for the day if you plan to linger.