Ivrea

Time for a day trip out of the city today! We were heading to the city of Ivrea, about 40 minutes north of Turin, close to the foothills of the Alps. We'd hoped to get away early, but the trains ran hourly except between 8:30 and 11:30 (there was no 9:30 or 10:30 service), so we had no choice but to go for the 11:30. So we arrived in Ivrea around lunchtime.

This was our first deliberate Tentative WHS - in addition to the confirmed official list, there's another, even longer list of Tentative sites. These are sites that governments have proposed adding to the World Heritage list, but haven't been added yet. These days you can only have one site added per year, so the tentative list grows rather than diminishes (sites that don't make it usually go back to Tentative for "further study" and "possible later inclusion").

Anyway, Ivrea will be voted on in 2018, so we figured that being in the area, we might as well have a look. It's a modern industrial town, and for many years was home to the Olivetti company. Originally they manufactured typewriters and mechanical calculators, but eventually moved into electronics and computers as well, though they've since folded.

The owning family, the Olivettis, were forward thinking and quite socialist in their principles, so in addition to the early modernist factories and buildings (now occupied by Vodafone), it had the hallmarks of a planned company town. It was quite interesting too, walking around and seeing everything - sort of a mix between the Van Nelle factory we saw in Rotterdam, and the Industrial-era company towns we saw in the UK (Saltaire, New Lanark etc).

It was also quite nice to just walk around and enjoy the site without filming; I'd decided that I wouldn't create videos for tentative sites if they were tentative when we visited. A slight shame, since it was probably the nicest weather we'd had in a week - bright and sunny though still a little chilly. About 10 degrees I think.

We wandered around for a couple of hours then got the train back to Turin. Briefly toyed with the idea of meeting up again with our Australian friends, but neither of us wanted to tackle the ridiculous stairs in our apartment block! Not sure if I mentioned it, but we're on the fifth floor here, so with no lift we have to climb 90 stairs every time we leave the flat. And we aren't even on the top floor! So in we stayed, more pasta for dinner.Read more