Not Everyone Can Digest a Rebuilt Turin
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

TURIN, Italy – Surely you’ve heard this one before, or at least one of its variants: In heaven, the cooks are Italian, the lovers are French, the police are British, and it’s all organized by the Germans; in hell, the cooks are British, the lovers are German, the police are French, and it’s all organized by the Italians.
Funny, then, that at the Winter Olympics in Turin, where the Italians do it all, the organization has been the least of their worries. It’s actually the hospitality the athletes are whining about.
After its first day at Turin’s Olympic Village, the Russian delegation had a laundry list of complaints worthy of a parvenu oligarch at a five-star hotel in the Cote d’Azure. The rooms were dirty, they said. They didn’t have televisions. There wasn’t enough food, and what little of it there was, was awful.
The president of the Russian Olympic Committee, Leonid Tyagachev, added in an interview with Corriere della Sera that apart from the lousy food, there were certain “annoying aesthetic characteristics,” as well.
Italians are notoriously concerned about the image of their country abroad – not the least of which, their sense of aesthetics – and the success of the Olympic Games has provided an acute case of anxiety here. Organizers anticipated the inevitable moaning in the American press about delayed construction projects, lower than expected ticket sales, the threat of strikes, and other gripes from the capital of capitalism. In fact, they had done much to accommodate their finicky American guests. For one thing, the entire spectacle was delayed by a week so as not to interfere with Super Bowl XL, an event whose sponsorship value is on par with the Olympic Games.
But complaints about the food in Italy? And this from the Russians?
If by “annoying aesthetic characteristics” Tyagachev was referring to the Village’s lollipop-colored apartment buildings set up for the athletes near the Lingotto neighborhood, he might have found a kindred spirit in Turin’s mayor, Sergio Chiamparino. Flying over the pastel palazzi in a helicopter with Italian state television RAI before the Games, Chiamparino shrugged when asked about its beauty. “Well, let’s say that in matters of taste, we aren’t all of the same mind,” he offered.
Instead, the Russian committee president was referring to the physical geography of the place. “The biggest problem here is the distance,” he said. “You can’t be asked to spend two hours traveling out to [the slopes in] Bardonecchia and another two coming back.”
Transportation has been one of the most complicated parts of the logistics puzzle. On Monday, some 36,000 spectators had to wait in the cold for bus rides between the competition sites of Pragelato and Cesena. A spokesperson for Turin’s Olympic Committee apologized afterward for the inconvenience and commented that the challenge of transporting so many passengers was a “learning experience.” Then, he countered, “There were another 20,000 spectators who took the trains, which, by the way, arrived on time.”
Aside from the large distance to the mountains, the choice of locale was bound to be somewhat controversial. The Olympic Village doesn’t exactly sit in a winter wonderland. The area just across the railroad tracks from the former Fiat factory in the Lingotto neighborhood had only been inhabitable by the right sort of people for about 10 years when it was designated as the site for the new village, including skating rinks, and other sports complexes.
Before the abandoned auto plant was turned into a shopping mall and conference center in the 1990s, this area around the Lingotto factory was a disintegrating, ex-industrial outskirt inhabited mostly by new immigrants and roamed by workers from the world’s oldest industry at night. Much as the organizers of a faltering Detroit hoped the Super Bowl would shed a positive light on a Motor City in decline, Turin officials hoped to use the Olympic infrastructure as a springboard for a neighborhood once inhabited by a now-fading Fiat.
Without a doubt, organizers wanted to project the opposite image – of a bustling, innovative city on the move. But this is not at all to say visitors to today’s Turin have been treated to a landscape of industrial blight. The downtown itself is of course the stately former home to the Savoy family, which unified Italy and ruled it until World War II, and during these Olympics, the center has never been so clean and vibrant since the royalty was kicked out of town.
The final irony in the athletes’ complaints about the Olympic village and the contrasting brilliance of a formerly dirty metropolis, is this: Italy, on a whole, has never been a country with much civic pride, but rather an inflated sense of family honor. Its streets and graffiti plastered walls may be dirtier than almost anywhere else in Western Europe, but once you cross the threshold of a private home, the place is immaculate and the hospitality legendary.
The 2006 Olympics have offered the opposite example. While the village has earned its detractors, public spaces are now the focal point of society. The cobblestones of the principal squares have been reset. Facades have been pressure washed. Locals are thrilled to offer directions to a new building. The entrance to the city, Turin’s Porta Nuova train station, looks as though it has been rebuilt from the ground up with banners welcoming you upon your arrival.
In fact, the city’s sanitation department, AMIAT, went so far as to include dozens of shiny new ashtrays lining the station’s platforms, despite a new law banning puffing in public places, and a decline in cigarette usage among Italians in general. Apparently Turin picked the wrong week to stop smoking.