Essays
On the Fourth, on the fifth, or Days in Torino
from phillyskyline.com
5 July 2009
I resist. Sitting in a luminous apartment, I hear a car’s engine. I hear birds. I hear church bells. “I think I am getting accustomed to those bells,” says Lena, 9. Actually, aside from a noticeable lack of police sirens, the sounds aren’t that different. We have church bells on Bainbridge Street.
This sort of thing is what I resist for now: the need to compare this city and ours, the form of one quite apparently based on the other (more on that subject later this week or next); and also the endless and centuries’ old cliché of American urban inferiority. They know how to live here. This too I resist.
Instead, and at least for now, resistance reveals: rhythmic monumentality. Unfurling piazzas. Aperitif. A languorous river. Arcades. Arabic in the market — Europe’s largest in open air. The Alps linger, and sometimes they are visible. But they are mostly forgotten here. This — Torino — is a serious city, a haughty, elegant, thinking place.
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