Day 3

Today, Saturday, I will spend the whole day at the Salone but I do have three workshops.

The Salone does not open until 11.00 so first I will have a little look at the city.

I chose to walk along the Via Roma which goes in a line north from the station and leads to the Palazzo Reale and the Palazzo Madama. The via Roma has covered footpaths for most of its length and these lead past very upmarket shops. Fashion Houses, International Merchants and rather swish cafes.

The Piazza San Carlo which would have been a wide and spacious square or garden was a large construction site for the new underground railway with large trucks going to and fro with spoil and materials. Beyond this the Piazza Castello was undisturbed.

I believe that this is The Teatro Regio.

“The Theatre Royal” perhaps.

It lies on the eastern side of the Piazza.

I am surprised that the Health and Safety Department has not closed down those unfenced fountains.

This is the Royal Palace or Palazzo Reale. It now houses the Royal Armoury, the Royal Library and the National Archive of Turin. A truly impressive building.

Around the east end of the Palazzo you come to the Museum of Antiquities complete with its own archaeological site.

Behind the Palazzo there is a large park euphemistically described as the Gardens of the Royal Palace. In effect it is a large open area with mature trees that must be an enormous picnic magnet in the summer.

The day that I was there it was a coach park for visiting bands of school children being brought to see the museums. All of the groups of school children that I met, and there were several at the Salone, all seemed to be well behaved.

The building that you can see in the background is the National Cinema Museum which is in the Mole Antoneliana. I visited this on my last day. The building was constructed in the 1860's initially for the Jewish community. For a number of years it was the highest stone building in Europe.

I returned from here down the other side of the Via Roma and made my way to the station for a pee. The toilets cost .70 euros but you could eat your dinner of off the floor.

Caught the bus outside the station and of to the Salone before it gets mobbed.

It is amazing what you can do with a few apples.

By this time I was suffering from stall saturation and I took very few further photographs of the stalls. Some of them were remarkable, most of them were interesting but there are limits to what you can absorb.

I did get highjacked into a tasting on the stall from the Trentino area of Italy. Here I had to suffer a selection of Cesarino sparkling wines all of which were very good even at midday and these were accompanied Trentingrana cheese which was also excellent.

Towards lunchtime I felt a bit peckish and by this time I was beginning to miss vegetables. I went to the snackbar and ordered a salad filled baguette and a cappuchino. The baguette went into the toaster! It was still super at 3.20 euros £2.50.

13.00

The first workshop was on Cocoa beans and chocolate. The experts comprised a chocolate maker from Paris, Michel Cluizel, a chocolate maker from California Mr Berger and a cocoa bean grower from Venezuela Claudio Calardo. We were presented with an array of some six or eight different chocolates or perhaps cocoa products would be a better description. The samples for tasting started with straight 100% cocoa butter then cocoa butter with granulated sugar added on through to sophisticated blends from both France and California. Most of the discussion by the experts was a bit esoteric for me being largely centred upon the attributes of different varieties of beans and the trends in crop sizes and markets in different parts of the world. To accompany the tasting we were offered a glass of Aqua Forte an Asti brandy which is no longer produced, a glass of what was claimed to be Glenmorangie but I think somebody trod on the cat while they were bottling it and an interesting spice flavoured fortified wine again from Asti 'Barolo Chinato Cocchi'. “A DOCG Barolo, flavoured with quinine bark, rhubarb and gentian,of which extracts are obtained through maceration at room temperature, with a final addition of spices, including selected cardamon seeds.”

The chance to taste such a wide variety of chocolate was interesting but I was unable to consume even a quarter of it. Doggy bag to take home the rest. The brandy and the Barolo Chinato were nice but the Glenmorangie was no more like the Glenmorangie that you buy here than fly to the moon. Apparently the excuse for the choice of drinks was to determine which drink went best with the chocolates.

16.00

The second workshop was 'Cured Meats along the Po'.

The wines accompanying this tasting were, Prosecco a Fortana, a red fizzy Lambrussco Montovani and a Palla Verga Colline.

The first offering was a cooked Goose Salami made in a gooses neck. This is sometimes referred to as Jews Salami or poor farmers salami. It is very tasty.

The next offering was a shoulder ham. This had a very good scent and was delicious

The third offering was a leg ham again with a very good scent and again it was delicious. It may be that both of these hams did carry significant amounts of fat and perhaps this enhanced the eating qualities.

These were followed by a selection of traditional Salamis. We were advised that it should be rubbery, it should smell nice, it must be made when the temperature is right and it must acquire the right moulds. Needless to say that all of the samples that we were offered were excellent and it was interesting to link the scents to the tastes.

The last offering was a slice of cured backfat. It was divine. If you look back to day 1 you will see that one of the early stall pictures is a lady slicing a huge chunk of backfat. Sometimes when there is just a shadow of flesh running through it it is sold as proscuttio.

Cairn Gourmet!

19.00

Carne.

The description was very attractive a tasting of three Italian breeds of beef cattle one a sample of Welsh Black beef.

There were the inevitable four wines but I am afraid that since this bought the daily total up to twelve glasses I failed to record the variety of one of them. I had worked out that enough was enough and I was now only tasting the wines and not drinking the glasses dry but still I did not record the fourth wine!

The first wine was labelled Gavi, the second Fonsino, I missed the third and the fourth wasCa Bianca. Apparently they were sourced either from Ca Bianca and Giulio Accornero e Figli.

We had before us a muster of eight speakers and I think that six or seven of them did speak. The large lady who was the supplier of the Welsh Blacks spoke for a long time and she gave a detailed description of the attributes of her cattle.

The Italian beef was from Chianina classica, Bovina Romagnola and Vacca Podolica del Gargano cattle. Certainly the first two of these breeds are muscle bound monsters favoured by the supermarket beef producers in this country. During our journey to the Ossala Mountains I had seen no beef cattle outside but I had seen a lot of buildings which could have been cattle sheds. I think that these two features explain why the Italian Beef was so pink – it was young and fattened too quickly on maize or barley.

The Italian samples were finely chopped raw meat. Mince. They were very light in colour had very little scent and I don't think that they had stopped twitching for long! The lady's Welsh Black was a small piece of cooked fillet. She was very apologetic that the carcase could not be hung properly because where beef is for export it must be boned out within twenty four hours of slaughter. The sample was lightly cooked and was superb. Perhaps the different cuisines demand different tastes but certainly the beef that I saw in the butchers shops in Turin looked a lot more like our butchers beef than the tasting samples did.

So that was really the end of day 3. During the gaps between the workshops I had continued my tour of the stalls and had a nice glass of green tea at the Hitachi stand. I was now two thirds through the stalls.

At the bust stop I met an American chap and when a number 15 tram came along he said we can get this one and if you get out just before it turns the corner you are quite close to the Porta Nuova. Whilst on the tram he started gazing at a 'must have' bus map. It was nearly 9.00pm and it was dark so it was difficult to plot your journey as the tram rattled along. However he picked the right stop and sure enough we were close to the station. On the way to the hotel I noticed that there was a stop after the corner that was even nearer the station. This American told me that there was a lift inside La Mole which took you up the the viewing platform half way up the tower.