Ready to Repeat History

Turin Hopes for Some Civic Bounce From the Games

TURIN, Italy When Evelina Christillin, a vice president of the Turin Olympic Organizing Committee, toured the globe to promote the city's quest for the 2006 Winter Olympics, she was careful to mark her map with Turin and the major cities of Europe -- Paris, London, Rome. "Otherwise, I found that nobody knew where we were really located," Christillin said.

Turin desperately hopes to shed this obscurity by hosting the Winter Games, which begin Friday with the Opening Ceremonies.

Once one of Italy's most influential cities, Turin has fallen on hard times. It is trying to emerge from an economic nosedive brought on by the decline of the automaker Fiat, itself a shrunken shadow of what it once was. In the 1950s, the company employed 130,000 workers in Turin. Today, the number is 14,000. As a partial cure, Turin is trying to take its place among the tourist destinations that make Italy a major global tourist attraction.

In that spirit, the Winter Olympics have become a giant Turinese urban repackaging project. A stadium built by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the early 1930s will be the site of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies after a $35 million renovation. The restored Palavela, originally built to celebrate the 1961 centenary of Italy's unification, will be the figure skating venue and then house some of the city's exquisite collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. A park where armies once paraded in front of Italy's royal family is a plaza for spectators. The town's central square will be the scene of medal ceremonies. The new hockey rink will be a congress center after the Olympics.

It's all an effort to give Turin a new image in the world and in Italy. "There is a crisis of industry and identity, so the Olympics comes at a good time," said Giuseppe Culicchia, a historian and novelist. "Turin is looking for a new start. A change of skin, not to mention its internal organs, will take some doing."

In this quest, Turin has one advantage: Reinvention is a local specialty. For a millennium, it was an obscure Medieval town. It grew into importance because of the Savoy royal family's decision to make it the capital of its south European kingdom and then by becoming the platform from which armies moved to unite fractious Italy. Turin was capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1864, when the seat of government moved to Florence before settling in Rome.

Local notables, beset by this loss of status, converted industries related to the crown to private manufacture. Arms makers became metalworking barons. Tailors for the royal court turned their attention to fashion. Theater producers started Italy's first movie industry. Turin's technicians produced the country's first radio network, a precursor of the present-day RAI state broadcasting giant.

And then came the automobile, morphing Turin into Italy's version of Detroit. Fiat's hulking Lingotto auto works -- itself converted into a flashy hotel and trade complex -- became the city's chief industrial emblem. The Agnelli family, Fiat's owners, replaced the Savoys as a kind of national royalty. Because of its legendary work ethic, Turin was known among Italians as a place that pulled in its sidewalks after sunset. The idea of fun seemed alien, which makes the slogan for the Winter Games, "Passion Lives Here," something out of character for Turin.

"There was a time when the sighting of tourists in Turin was a curiosity," said Mercedes Bresso, governor of Piemonte, the area that encompasses Turin. "People stared at them. Why would anyone come here?"

An effort to ride Olympic celebrity to metropolitan notoriety is nothing new for Olympic host cities. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Barcelona became wildly fashionable after hosting the 1992 Summer Games. Not so Atlanta after 1996. For winter hosts, which have the task of making athletic contests such as luge, skeleton and curling widely appealing, it is even more difficult to gain prominence from the Winter Olympics.

Just how many tourists will tromp along Turin's wide French-style boulevards in February is a matter of conjecture. Reports of slow ticket sales, especially for lesser-known events, foreshadow a possible attendance disaster. Christillin is unworried; she sees hordes of French, Germans and Scandinavians motoring to the city without advance purchases and filling arenas and cafes.

The customary pre-Olympic tension of getting the competition sites and attendant public works ready also has gripped the city. Workers just a few weeks back were busily paving a back lot to the new hockey center, where tour guides promised everything would be ready on time. Even local officials acknowledge that some public works might leave holes in city streets the day of the Opening Ceremonies.

Finances also are a preoccupation. There is a $45 million deficit in spending by the Turin Organizing Committee that no one knows exactly how to fill. One idea is to sell off some sites; the Olympic Village, for instance, which is a collection of apartment buildings designed by top European architects, might be auctioned off.

No Italian event would be complete without a political demonstration, and local unhappiness over a branch of a cross-Europe high-speed railway has provided fears that street protests might break out during the Games. Specifically, protesters in the Susa Valley are trying to stop construction of a long tunnel that will allow high-speed TAV trains to travel through the Alps into France. A sign on a recent protest banner read: "No TAV. No Olympics. Live a low velocity life." As a herald of the possible chaos, anti-TAV protesters blocked the nationwide barnstorming of the Olympic flame through Genoa on Dec. 18.

City boosters see the TAV as a part of Turin's revival, since it will reduce the time of rail travel to Lyon in central France. Turin has experienced a rebirth of moviemaking and high-tech research. But Turinese need to break through a certain pessimism born of having lost out in history, said Enrico Salza, president of SanPaolobank, one of Turin's business mainstays. "There's a feeling here of what will be will be. We have to accept challenges," Salza said, as he mused on the city's future from his multi-mirrored gilt office overlooking broad Piazza Carlina. SanPaolo paid about $50 million to use the Olympics logo next to its own brand.

"It's not that we have an inferiority complex," said Bresso, the regional governor. "But we don't get the attention of other Italian cities. People still think of Turin as an ugly industrial city. We want to show off our richness."

One famed city artifact will not be put on display: the Shroud of Turin. Revered as the image of the crucified Christ, it is housed in a reliquary inside Turin Cathedral and has only been brought out for viewing five times in the last 106 years. The last took place during the millennial year 2000.