Road Trip Torino: Day 10

If you’re ever in Torino, you absolutely positively MUST go to a place called Eataly. It’s down near the Linghotto complex, and easy to get to with public transportation. It’s a foodie paradise.

It’s enormous, and you can easily spend half a day in there. Which is a good thing, because it was raining again yesterday. Sigh. When you go in, the first thing you see is a giant banner welcoming you to Eataly and outlining their philosophy:

”Eating is an agricultural act.” This is the essence of Eataly, linked closely to the Slow Food movement. “The first agriculture action to accomplish is for the consumer to choose what to eat.” And here, the choice is almost overwhelming. Lest we forget:

“The products of the season are better and cost less”. In each department you can not only buy but also consume the products of the season. Here’s the vegetable department, where you can buy veggies or order a plate of them:

Other departments feature cheese, meat, sausages and hams, bread, pasta, sauces, gelato, sweets, canned food:

And extensive wine and beer sections, where the light was very low and photos were almost impossible. I did manage this one though:

You can bring your own bottles and fill them with local wines for 1.50 – 3 Euros a bottle, depending on the wine. They also had some very expensive wines—Dan and I were checking out a 200 Euro bottle of Barolo when we heard a crash from the next aisle over…Yikes! We didn’t even want to know what got broken. The beer section was also veryvery large. It not only included hundreds of varieties of beer (some from Belgium) but also the bathrooms:

“The toilets are naturally in the beer department, downstairs” Somebody has a sense of humor!

We had lunch at Eataly, in the pasta department. Dan had a plate of ravioli with borrage filling, and I had a pizza, made in a wood fired oven:

Afterwards, Dan had an expresso:

Next to the coffee bar was the department where you could buy aperitifs. Torino is the home of Vermouth, invented by the Martini family. Here at Eataly you can find a huge variety of aperitifs. I loved this department. It reminded me of a library:

Downstairs, near the beer and wine, is a section dedicated to demonstrating the aging of cheeses and prosciutto. Here are some wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano:

This place was amazing. It’s worth a trip to Torino just to see it. I bought a couple of things to bring home. Heh, heh…


To be continued….