15-minute city: life is easier in Turin

Cities can be judged by their size, accumulation of capital, public image, presence of vibrant and vibrant creative and manufacturing scenes. But sometimes a city’s thermometer can be – quite literally – the thermometer. It’s November 23, 2022, in Turin, it’s 7.45. You are a little ill, a little feverish (37.5) and yet you have to complete some ungrateful tasks of that strange video game that is existence, very unattractive things, like quickly taking a Covid test at the pharmacy (via San Francesco d’Assisi, negative) pay fines (540 euros, tobacconist’s shop in via Pietro Micca) or more rewarding (albeit tiring) such as taking three five-year-old children to kindergarten (via Cavour, centre) finally bringing your dad two kg of apples and other fruit, bought on the fly at a market along the road (via San Secondo), without meeting him directly, so as not to attack any other viruses (via Vespucci, Crocetta district), to then finally reach home (via Santa Giulia , Vanchiglia district) and conquering an interlude of immobility and rest (these are lives in which ‘going to bed is a privilege to be conquered by planting your nails in the list of missions to which you can assign the green tick, done. It’s 8.45.

Normally all these missions (to which are usually added three trips to Milan a week (Porta Susa) and at least one plane every two weeks (Caselle), you carry them out on a motorbike, which makes every turn and every passage as light as the wings of Hermes; but it’s almost December, albeit in an era of climate change, and perhaps you’ve caught a cold precisely because it’s always May in your head. In this case, in order not to succumb to shivering and screaming bones, you took a taxi. Everything (a part of the Covid test, done on foot), was carried out with the kind assistance of a female taxi driver (always choose female taxi drivers, the world would be better if there were only female taxis), a series of stop and gos, a car hybrid, which waited for each mission and then set off again for the next stage. Real transit time in traffic, 45 minutes, price 29 euros. If you take a map of the city and mark the different episodes of this pilgrimage (considering the preferential lanes), you understand even if you are not from Turin we have crossed at least 3 different districts, respected almost all the timetables and deliveries, and if we had been on a moped we would have done it even earlier (and spent less). Turin is the Italian city whose horizon is 15 minutes citya radical proximity of services and shops and offices, at least if you live in the areas close to the centre, is fully realised, and if the 15 minutes have become 45 it is only because the writer likes to live dangerously, accumulate game levels, and the taxi in this case is an exception, because when you are afflicted by flu symptoms it is better not to drive and bring home the result without risking worsening the situation.

If we add that Porta Susa is 40 minutes away from perhaps the most energetically important city in southern Europe (Milan), to which Turin must in my opinion inevitably join in a sort of widespread ‘Milangeles’, and which, with a little luck, the fever it will pass, and you will go back to darting with wet eyes among the cars, you can understand a good half of the reasons why if you have a large family and high mobility Turin is the ideal city in Italy (including rents). The other half is the beauty, the parks, the river that has finally regained some water after the drought, the museums and culture, the perfect trattorias. Life, when you don’t have a fever.

The author
46 years old, from Turin, he has published with Minimux fax, Laterza and Bur-RCS. With Stefano Boeri he directed Festarch

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