Back in the days when I lived in Turin, I went along to several parties. One particular one stood out. I don’t remember the name of the venue, only that everybody referred to it as “at the zoo”. From what I can see now by peeking through the rusty gate on Corso Casale, the alternative club where I partied is permanently closed, like all the other shacks dotting the 25,000 sqm area of Turin’s ex-zoo.
Speaking of Urbex in Italy… I’ve kept the pictures of Racconigi mental asylum in my phone for almost one year. I’ve back-up them on every possible device and yet I was unable to delete them from the one device I always carry with me, and I became addicted to browsing through them and feeling the eerie atmosphere of that place once again.
If you want to do some urbex in Italy, the former mental asylum is just one of the abandoned highlights that you can explore in the province of Vercelli and, as it is pretty complicated to get in, it’s wise to go there with a plan B (and C, and D). Here is what I visited during my two trips to Vercelli, until I finally managed to enjoy a tour of the abandoned asylum: a stunning example of industrial archaeology, a ghost town with some frescoed villas and the former pulmonology hospital, now well-known for being the setting of several ghost-stories.
Last time I mentioned that my old neighborhood, San Salvario, is almost unrecognizable from the time I was living there; even if I didn’t experience San Salvario’s Blade Runner Times (those of “I’ve seen things, in San Salvario, you people wouldn’t believe”), I’ve been so lucky to live in San Salvario before the whole neighborhood turned into an open air night club, loosing its genuine charm.
The best aspect of living in many different towns is that you end up having just as many homes away from home. Besides digging into Turin’s industrial archaeology, its street art and the outskirts I am going to show you in this post, spending a weekend in Turin meant so much more for me: catching up with old friends, marveling at how Turin has changed (or hasn’t), but most of all reconnecting with an old version of myself that I’ve put aside since I came back to live in Rome.
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