Turin is the Italian city where the day of the week matters more than the weather, and that is not a line written for effect: it is the practical constraint I had to build this itinerary around, after opening the official website of every single stop one by one.
On Wednesday the Royal Palace, the Galleria Sabauda and Guarini’s Chapel of the Shroud all close together, and on the same day the tram up to Superga does not run. On Tuesday the Mole Antonelliana and its Cinema Museum close, which is to say the symbol of the city. On Monday the Museo Egizio shuts at 2 pm, and you do not notice until you turn up at three. No printed guide puts those three facts together, and they are exactly the three facts that decide whether the trip works.
This guide keeps the centre in the first day and the hill in the second, but the two days can be swapped, and further down I explain when it is worth doing. All the prices and opening hours are at the foot of the article, in one place, with the date I checked them.
The day of the week, which here decides more than the weather
Which day of the week can ruin a weekend in Turin? The table is worth looking at before you buy the train ticket.
| Day | What you lose |
|---|---|
| Monday | the Museo Egizio closes at 2 pm |
| Tuesday | Mole Antonelliana and Cinema Museum closed, and Palazzo Madama closes too |
| Wednesday | Musei Reali closed (Royal Palace, Sabauda, Armoury, Chapel of the Shroud) and the Sassi-Superga tram does not run |
| Thursday to Sunday | everything is open |
If you arrive on a Tuesday, start with the Musei Reali and the Egizio and push the Mole to the second day. If you arrive on a Wednesday, do the opposite: Mole and Egizio on day one, Musei Reali on day two, and go up to Superga by bus rather than by tram. If you arrive on a Thursday, the order below works as it stands.
There is a fourth constraint that has nothing to do with opening hours and needs saying straight away, because it is the commonest disappointment here: the Shroud is not on view. I come back to it further down, with what you see instead.
Day 1, morning: the Museo Egizio
Why put the Museo Egizio first, and early? You start here for two reasons. The first is that the Museo Egizio sells online only, with a timed slot, so you pick the hour yourself but you pick it before you leave home. The second is that it asks for at least two and a half hours, and anyone who puts it in the afternoon ends up rushing.
It is the most important Egyptian collection in the world after Cairo, and it was born in 1824, when Carlo Felice bought Bernardino Drovetti’s collection. It is also, in all likelihood, the oldest Egyptian museum in the world, because it opened to the public in 1832, before Italy itself existed. Between 1903 and 1937 the excavations of Ernesto Schiaparelli and then Giulio Farina brought another thirty thousand objects here.
The main room is the Gallery of Kings, with the monumental statues from Thebes. If what you have in mind is the dark room with spotlights, it is gone: on 20 November 2024, for the bicentenary, it was replaced by a new display that lets daylight in. Downstairs is the temple of Ellesiya, which Egypt gave to Italy in 1970 in return for the rescue of the Nubian temples: it was cut into sixty-six blocks, shipped and reassembled here.
I have given the museum an article of its own, with the works to look for and the story of how they got here: Museo Egizio, Turin.
Day 1: piazza Castello and the Musei Reali
From the museum to piazza Castello is a five-minute walk, and the square on its own explains how Turin works. On one side stands Palazzo Madama, which has a baroque facade by Juvarra at the front and a medieval fortress at the back, on the same building. Facing it is the white front of the Royal Palace, and between them the dome of San Lorenzo, which is by Guarino Guarini and is worth stepping inside even when you are short of time, because it costs nothing and the vault is one of the strangest things in Italian baroque.
The Musei Reali are a single fifteen-euro ticket for five things: the Royal Palace with its state apartments, the Royal Armoury, the Galleria Sabauda, the Museum of Antiquities and the Gardens. That is a great deal, which is exactly why it pays to decide in advance what you want to see rather than walking through all of it in a line.
Inside the Royal Palace, the two things worth seeking out are Juvarra’s Scala delle Forbici, a problem of structural engineering solved so elegantly that it looks like an ornament, and the Ballroom by Pelagio Palagi. In the Sabauda there are Jan van Eyck’s Stigmata of Saint Francis, Fra Angelico’s Madonna and Child and Pollaiolo’s Tobias and the Angel.
I have given the Musei Reali an article of their own, with the three things to look for in the Sabauda and the calendar trap: Royal Palace and Galleria Sabauda.
The Chapel of the Shroud, which is inside the same ticket
Where do you go in, to see the Chapel of the Holy Shroud? Plenty of people look for it from the outside and cannot find it, because it has no entrance of its own: the Chapel of the Shroud is visited from inside the Musei Reali route, on the same ticket, and it sits wedged between the cathedral and the Royal Palace because it had to serve the court and the faithful at once.
Guarino Guarini took it over in 1668, when the site had stood still for forty-four years, and turned it into what it is: a dome built from six tiers of six small arches, each one footed on the apex of the two below, tightening as they rise and letting light through between one order and the next. Seen from underneath it does not look like a dome, it looks like a beehive receding.
On 11 April 1997 a fire wrecked the chapel and the firefighters carried the cloth out after smashing its case open with a mallet. It reopened on 27 September 2018, twenty-one years later.
I have given the chapel, and the Shroud you cannot see, an article of their own: Guarino Guarini’s Chapel of the Shroud.
Day 1, afternoon: the cathedral, and the Shroud you cannot see
Turin cathedral is two steps away, free to enter, and it is the only Renaissance church in a city centre that is baroque throughout. But the reason people go is a different one, and it needs saying plainly.
The Shroud is not on display. It lies in the last chapel of the left aisle, inside a conservation case which is itself locked inside a metal box, and it comes out only for public ostensions. The next one has no date: the official Shroud website says nobody knows when it will be, because the Pope decides. What you see today is the box, and the screens along the aisle explaining the cloth in several languages.
This is not something to bury at the foot of an article. Anyone travelling to Turin for it needs to know first, and knowing it first means walking in with the right expectation and still finding something worth the time: Guarini’s chapel above, the chequered floor, and the Museum of the Shroud in via San Domenico if the subject genuinely interests you.
Day 2, morning: the Mole Antonelliana
The Mole is 167.5 metres tall and it is the most Turinese thing there is, in the sense that it was born to be something else and never became it. Building began in 1863 for the city’s Jewish community, which wanted a synagogue: Alessandro Antonelli kept raising it beyond the approved design, the costs exploded, and in 1873 the community handed it over to the city in an exchange and went off to build its synagogue elsewhere.
Antonelli died in October 1888, a year before the building was finished. On 23 May 1953 a whirlwind took away forty-seven metres of the spire, which was rebuilt with a steel structure inside.
Since 2000 it has housed the National Museum of Cinema, which is the real reason to go in: the central hall is the hollow of the building, tens of metres high, with red loungers in the middle and themed chapels around it. The panoramic lift rises through the void of the dome to the little temple at 85 metres, and it is a separate ticket: 18 euros the museum, 9 the lift alone, 23 the two together.
It closes on Tuesday. That is the constraint that moves the whole itinerary.
I have given the Mole and the museum an article of their own, with the story of the building site and the rules for climbing on foot: Mole Antonelliana and the Cinema Museum.
Day 2, afternoon: the basilica of Superga
Superga stands at 672 metres on the hill across the Po, and its story begins with a promise made at a bad moment. On 2 September 1706 Turin had been under French siege for four months; Vittorio Amedeo II climbed the hill to look down on the city and vowed to build a church if he came out of it alive. Five days later he won.
The design is by Filippo Juvarra, first stone on 20 July 1717, inaugurated on 1 November 1731. It is 51 metres long and 75 high with the dome, and the striking thing is that the columned portico and the drum are not joined as they would be in any other church: Juvarra kept them apart, so that from a distance the basilica looks like two buildings brushing against each other.
There are four things to visit, each with its own ticket. The church and the Chapel of the Vow are free. The dome costs 4 euros and is 131 spiral steps: from up there you see the plain all the way to the Alps, and it is the view you cannot buy anywhere else in Turin. The Royal Tombs, where Vittorio Amedeo II, Carlo Emanuele III, Vittorio Emanuele I and Carlo Alberto lie, cost 6 euros and are visited only in a guided group, forty-five minutes, in Italian. The Royal Apartment costs 6 euros and has only two visits a day.
I have given the basilica an article of its own, with the dome, the Royal Tombs and the tram timetable: the basilica of Superga.
Behind the apse is the memorial stone of 4 May 1949, when the aircraft bringing the Grande Torino football team home crashed in fog into the retaining wall behind the basilica. Every year, on that date, thousands of people climb up here.
The 1884 rack tram, which is half the reason to go up
You reach Superga on the Sassi-Superga rack tram, and taking the bus instead is like going to Venice and getting around by taxi: you arrive, but you miss the best part.
The line has been running since 26 April 1884. At first the carriages were hauled up by a steel cable; in 1934 it was converted to a rack, that is, a toothed central rail the carriage’s gear grips onto. It is 3,100 metres, 425 of them vertical, an average gradient of 13.5 per cent with stretches of 21, and eighteen minutes of climbing through the woods. The carriages are the historic ones, red and cream.
On Wednesday the tram does not run, and on public holidays there is a shuttle called Superga Express from piazza Vittorio Veneto, with bus line 79/ suspended while that service is active. The timetable is seasonal and changes at the end of September: the one at the foot of this article is the summer one, checked today.
The arcades, which here are not background detail
Turin has eighteen kilometres of arcades, more than twelve of them linked without a break, and it is a network built on purpose: it let the court, and later the middle class, move from one end of the centre to the other without getting wet and without being too visible. Walking under the arcades of via Po from piazza Castello down to the river, or under those of piazza San Carlo early in the morning, is a way of seeing the city that costs nothing and that no museum can give back to you.
In among them are the historic cafés, which in Turin are a piece of applied art history rather than a food stop: wooden counters and nineteenth-century mirrors, left as they were. I am not listing them, because this is not that kind of guide, but if you pass one, look inside.
What not to do
Do not put the Museo Egizio and the Musei Reali in the same afternoon. They are two museums of two and a half hours each, five minutes apart, and the temptation is strong: the result is that you look badly at the second one.
Do not go up to Superga without checking the weather. The climb to the dome is closed in strong wind, bad weather or temperatures above 32 degrees, and finding that out at the top of the hill costs you half a day.
Do not count on the Shroud, for the reason given above.
Do not assume that “Turin can be done in a day”. You read it often, and it comes from the fact that the centre is small and entirely flat. But the two main collections are among the largest in Italy, and in one day you do either the Egizio or the Musei Reali.
If you have half a day more
Three directions, in the order I would recommend them.
Palazzo Madama, in piazza Castello, which is a medieval castle, a Juvarra facade and a museum of early art all at once, with Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man. It closes on Tuesday, like the Mole, so it fits neatly into the day the Mole is lost.
The Monte dei Cappuccini, across the Po, twenty minutes on foot from the centre: it is the spot the photographs of Turin with the Alps behind are taken from, and it is free.
The hunting lodge of Stupinigi, if you have transport or patience with public transport: it is out of town, it is by Juvarra and it is the most theatrical of the Savoy residences.
Practical information
Checked on 2 September 2026 on the official websites of each museum. Prices and hours change: before you travel, check at least the Musei Reali and the Superga tram, which are the two with the most movable calendar.
Tickets. The Museo Egizio costs 18 euros full price, with purchase compulsorily online and a timed slot; it is free with the Abbonamento Musei and the Torino+Piemonte Card. The Musei Reali cost 15 euros full price and 2 euros reduced for EU citizens aged 18 to 25, free under 18: the ticket covers the Royal Palace, the Armoury, the Galleria Sabauda, the Museum of Antiquities, the Gardens and the Chapel of the Shroud. The Mole Antonelliana costs 18 euros for the museum alone, 9 for the panoramic lift alone and 23 for the two together. At Superga the church is free, the dome costs 4 euros and 3 reduced, the Royal Tombs 6 and 5, the Royal Apartment 6 and 5. The cathedral is free.
Opening hours. Museo Egizio: Monday 9 am to 2 pm, Tuesday to Friday and Sunday 9 am to 6.30 pm, Saturday 9 am to 8 pm. Musei Reali: Thursday to Tuesday 9 am to 7 pm, closed on Wednesday, ticket office until 6 pm and last entry at 6 pm; the Gardens open at 8.30 am. Mole Antonelliana and Cinema Museum: 9 am to 7 pm, closed on Tuesday, last entry an hour before. Superga: Monday to Friday 10 am to 1.30 pm and 2.30 to 6 pm, Saturday, Sunday and holidays 10 am to 7 pm without a break, with the last Royal Tombs visit forty-five minutes before closing. Cathedral: daily 9 am to 12.30 pm and 3 to 7 pm, with the chapel closed during services.
Free entry and reductions. At the Musei Reali entry is free on the first Sunday of the month, and also on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November. At Superga the reduced rate also applies to the over 65s, who in Italian state museums no longer get in free.
Getting there. The centre is all walkable: from Porta Nuova station to piazza Castello is fifteen minutes under the arcades of via Roma. For Superga take tram 15 or a bus to Sassi station and the rack tram from there: hourly departures from 10 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday with the last descent at 6.30 pm, no service on Wednesday; on Saturday, until the end of September, from 9 am to 11 pm with the last descent at 11.30 pm; on Sunday and holidays from 9 am to 8 pm, last descent at 8.30 pm.
How long it takes. The Museo Egizio asks two and a half hours, three if you read the labels. The Musei Reali two and a half hours for the full route, an hour and a half if you pick only the Royal Palace and the Chapel. The Mole with the museum an hour and a half, plus half an hour of queuing for the lift at weekends. Superga is half a day counting the tram both ways.
On affiliate links, for the sake of honesty. You will not find booking links in this article. The paying stops all have their own official channels: the Egizio sells only on its own website, and Superga allows purchase online or at the ticket office. I am not sending you elsewhere for something that is done better directly.
Have a good trip, and if you can choose, choose a Thursday.
Photo credits: dawn panorama by Maurizio Moro5153, Museo Egizio facade by Gianni Careddu, piazza Castello by Guglielmo di Rivoli (CC0), piazza San Carlo by Neq00, cathedral nave by TorinoDoc, Mole Antonelliana by Mongolo1984, basilica of Superga by Paris Orlando, Sassi-Superga tram by Smiley.toerist and via Po arcades by Zairon (CC BY-SA 4.0); Chapel of the Shroud by Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart (CC BY 4.0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
