Comune > Turismo e promozione > Torino Turistica (English) > Curiosity > Turin's porticoes, avenues and green areas
Turin's porticoes, avenues and green areas
Turin has always been known as the living-room town and seems built to walk calmly along its avenues and through its squares and admire the historical centre with its many elegant old meeting places preserved with such care. You can make your stroll and enjoy one of the features that make it so different ...
The Porticoes
Turin is the great town of porticoes - over 16 kilometres in all! From the wide and beautiful ones in the town centre with grey stone (Via Po) or marble (Via Roma) pavements to the humbler and more strictly functional ones of the peripheral ones, porticoes are a unique urban features in their extension and development along streets, avenues and squares.
Porticoes shelter you from the rain and sun, lend themselves to comfortable strolling and dehors cafés and are useful and pleasant social meeting points
The birth of the portico architectural system
Porticoes have been a familiar feature of Turin ever since the Middle Ages (a typical example being Piazza delle Erbe, now Piazza Palazzo di Città) but only became a typical element of the town's architecture in the early 17th Century. This is proven by the Ordinance of June 16 1606 by Carlo Emanuele I, which refers specifically to the construction of Piazza Castello on a project by Ascanio Vitozzi. Later (1630-1650); porticoed Piazza San Carlo was designed and built on a project by architects Carlo and Amedeo di Castellamonte, while Filippo Juvarra built the porticoes of the quarters of Porta Susina and the market square of Porta Palazzo. In 1756 Benedetto Alfieri resumed and completed the project for the new porticoes of Piazza Palazzo di Città.
Other porticoed areas were added to the existing ones during the 19th Century, suc
The tree-lined avenues
Turin has some 320 square kilometres of tree-line avenues! The plants along the avenues are about 65,000 all told, 20,000 being plane trees, 8,000 lime-trees, 4,000 maples, 3,500 horse chestnuts, 3,000 white elm-trees, 2,500 Siberian elms, as well as birches, hornbeams, cherry-trees, horse-chestnuts, ash-trees, American walnut trees, magnolias, pine-trees, firs, oaks and other. There's at least the same number in the town parks and gardens.
The story of Turin's avenues started in 1808 when the Council of Builders defined their general plan and developed in 1814 with urban planner and Architect Lombardi, though the great communication ways with the House of Savoy residences already were long and straight tree-lined avenues. Projects were increasingly improved on and the creation of the wide avenues surrounding the town was finalised in 1817.
Public green areas
Turin is the town with the greatest extension of public green areas of the whole of Italy! - over 15.5 million square mCetres (about 14 square metres per inhabitant), followed by Rome (10), Milan (9), Palermo (5) , Bari (3) and so on. Turin has twenty-five town and hillside parks; the most famed being the Valentino with its 500,000 square metre. The biggest is the Pellerina, Italy's largest town park with its 840,000 square metres. Overall, public green at Turin has over 150,000 trees divided into some 85 different species.
The culture of green as the harmony of spirit and urban structure should be felt more deeply by many citizens who often even ignore the names of the most important of these silent and healthy companions that embellish our Turin ...
