Italy, Day 3

Today Cantor, Mauro, Lillo (the little Weiner dog) hopped into the silver Fiat Punto, which, statisitically, 99% of Italians own an exact copy of (except that one guy, the one who drives the Ferrari). We drove the hour and a half trip up to Torino (in inglese: Turin), site of the '06 Winter Olympics, and because of that fact, all of the parks and public places were newly renovated, with a few extra sculptures and such to boot.

We spent the morning touring the Museo di Cinema, a museum that documents the history and evolution of film. The museum is, strangely enough, inside the Duomo, Torino's most outstanding and recognizable building. The Duomo is a former synagogue, with a spire sticking well above the rest of the city. If something wasn't lost in translation, I've been told that the Duomo is currently, or at least was at one time, the worlds highest free-standing brick structure. Cool stuff.

Inside the museum was quite trippy. The displays started with the early machines, made from controlled shadow puppets silhouetted against a screen, and went on to 3-d viewmaster type machines (with a few featuring nude women doing not-so-high-cultural things, to keep the Europeans happy). The displays went on through the making of short films, to full film sets. The crowning display was on the main, open floor of the Duomo. They had fully reclined movie seats that you lay back on to watch clips of films from the past, and after the concluded, onto the dome of the Duomo they projected a light show of movie stars and various other things, with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff like that. As the show comes to a crescendo, curtains around the top of the dome all shoot open up at once, and illuminates the dome in the most startling and fantastic way.

Posted with this entry are a few pictures taken from the spire of the Duomo, and since there's no other good place to say it, I want to mention how frickin scary the elevator up is. You see, the center of the dome is completely open. So you get in a 4x6 foot glass box, and are lifted over a hundred feet in the air on a ricketly little elevator suspended just by a couple of cables that happen to be hanging down. Fun stuff.

After we left the museum, we walked around Torino a bit to find a cheap restaurant. We finally found a place that seemed cheap enough, €6 for a plate of potato's, salami (little sausages) in tomato sauce, and a heap of bowtie noodles in a tomato and mussel sauce. It was a little cold, but still quite good. It wasn't until we got the bill that we realized the catch. €6 for the food, yes, but €4 ($5.50 American) for a can of Coke.

Such is life.

Anywho, we headed off afterwards to the Egyptian Museum, the second largest one in the world next to the one in Cairo itself. And man, those folks had so many sarcophig(uses? i?) they didn't quite know what do do with them. Unlike American museums, anything made of stone and unpainted, basically anything indestructable too big to steal, was sitting out in the open. No glass, no ropes. So, if you've ever wanted to lick Osiris, or cuddle with the sarcophagus of a dead pharoah, now's your chance. Live the dream.

I'm back in Varallo now, enjoying the fresh mountain air and relaxing, so I'm going to hit the sack early tonight, it's only 2 am.

Night folks,

Tristan

---

---