Thursday, July 6th

After another wonderful breakfast, I dressed for possible rain which was forecast for the day. Wearing my new funky green and black Nike sneakers, I headed out towards Piazza Castello to try again to tour the Palazzo Reale. One of the seams near the laces started rubbing against my skin and so I decided to stop in the Goldenpoint store on Via Roma to buy a thicker pair of socks. My new socks worked.

I stopped in a few more shops along the way before finally reaching Piazza Castello, where I returned to the ticket area at Palazzo Reale. This time, I was able to purchase a ticket and only had to wait 10 minutes for the next tour to begin. Palazzo Reale was one of the residences of the Savoy family.

The tour guide arrived and off we went. We followed him up a beautiful staircase to the first floor. This was the floor we would tour. The first few rooms we toured were similar to other palaces I have toured in the past. The tour guide spoke rapid Italian and much of the vocabulary was new to me. I could pick out a few words here and there, but learned more information from the descriptions of each room written in four languages on boards placed in each room.

I usually was the last person to head on to the next room because the descriptions were pretty detailed and took me a few minutes to read.

There was a second man whose job seemed to be to make sure no one wandered away during the tour. He was the last one to follow the group into each room. I thanked him for letting me spend a few extra minutes in each room reading the boards. He asked me if I could understand the tour guide. I told him that I could only understand a few words. He was very kind and even told me more information about some of the rooms. He spoke very clear Italian and was easy to understand.

My favorite rooms were the dining hall, which had a beautifully set table with fancy china, glasses and silverware and the ballroom, which was huge and very elegantly decorated. The last stop on the tour was the famous Scala delle Forbici (Scissor Staircase). This staircase did not have a description provided in English. The tour guide went into a very long description of this room. My friend, the other tour guide, asked if I understood. I did not and so he then proceeded to explain the significance of the staircase.

*I don’t believe photos were allowed as I don’t have any photos from my visit. I found this Palazzo Reale website with a great collection of photos (the photos only seem to show up on the Italian language version & not on the English version of the website). Just scroll down a bit to the Palazzo Reale in Foto section.

After finishing the tour of the Palazzo Reale, I next went to tour the Armeria Reale (Royal Armory). The armory was located next to the Palazzo Reale. It houses an extensive collection of weapons, both ancient and more modern. I am not generally a fan of weapons and armories, but this one was quite amazing.

By this time, I was getting hungry. I stopped for lunch at an outdoor café on Via Garibaldi. I ordered a caprese salad and a cheese, eggplant and zucchini baguette. Via Garibaldi is another street which is full of shopping and also has many sidewalk cafés. Lunch was just okay.

After lunch, I decided to check out the Contrada dei Guardinfanti area of Torino… the oldest part of the city centre, which was located close by. I took some photos and wandered into a few stores.

The sky quickly darkened and it began to rain. Luckily Torino is a city with many porticoes (covered walkways) and so I managed to stay pretty dry as I headed back towards my hotel. It started to thunder and I could see the lightning flash across the sky. I ducked into the fnac store, a huge store that sells computers, computer accessories, DVDs, CDs and books.

I went downstairs and spent the next two hours wandering through the dvd, cd, and book sections of the stores. I ended up purchasing two DVDs. The woman at the cash register asked me for my passport when I tried to pay with my visa card. This was the first time I was asked for my passport in my 7 years of visiting Italy (except of course at the airport and when checking into each hotel). I did not have my passport with me but did have a copy. She said that was fine. After getting my receipt, with the skies clearing, I headed back outside.

For dinner, I headed back to the Contrada dei Guardinfanti area to a restaurant I noticed earlier in the day. I planned to order some sort of pasta dish but when I saw this delicious pizza go buy, I ended up ordering a pizza again. I also enjoyed a delicious tiramisu for dessert. The cost was €11 for the pizza, the dessert and the water. This confirmed my suspicion that something was not right with my bill at Urbani. I guess I was still obsessing a little about my dinner Wednesday night.