Turin

Italy's unification was engineered from Turin. The House of Savoy ruled from this Piedmontese capital for centuries, and when Cavour orchestrated Italian unification in 1861, Turin served as the first capital of the Kingdom of Italy—before the government moved to Florence and then Rome. The city's brief tenure as national capital established a pattern: Turin builds institutions that outgrow it.

FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) was founded here in 1899 and became Italy's largest private employer. By the 1960s, the Mirafiori plant employed over 50,000 workers, and southern Italian migrants flooded north to fill assembly lines—a migration that transformed Turin from a Piedmontese city into Italy's industrial engine. At its peak, FIAT's Agnelli family controlled 4.5% of Italian GDP through a web of companies spanning automobiles, aerospace, insurance, and media. Turin was a company town at national scale.

FIAT's decline forced reinvention. The Lingotto factory—once Europe's largest car plant, with a rooftop test track—became a conference center, hotel, and art gallery after closing in 1982. The 2006 Winter Olympics catalyzed a broader transformation, converting industrial infrastructure into cultural and technological assets. The Polytechnic University of Turin now feeds aerospace (Leonardo), automotive engineering (Stellantis, successor to FIAT Chrysler), and a growing AI and robotics sector.

Turin's 870,000 residents occupy a city still marked by industrial grid planning—broad avenues designed for factory logistics rather than leisure. The transition from monoculture manufacturing to diversified innovation mirrors ecological succession: a cleared industrial landscape being colonized by knowledge-economy species. Whether Turin becomes Italy's technology capital or remains forever defined by the automaker that left depends on whether the new ecosystem can generate its own gravity rather than living on FIAT's institutional inheritance.