Thoroughly Modern Italy

I had originally written a ton more for this post, but Blogger was working strangely and I lost all the work. :(

So just a small blurb of what we did after Parma.  The day we left, we went into Turin to look at a car museum and a cinema museum.  The Car museum looked at the history of cars, from Leonardo da Vinci's sketches, through the first mass produced cars, up to about the early 2000s.  I noticed car technology hasn't changed much between the 60s and the more recent cars.  Things have become more refined but they had power steering, automatic transmissions, suspension, and disk brakes.  With the notable exception of better safety features.  But today we are undergoing a modern renaissance of car design.  Cars are being computerized, with reverse cameras and on-board navigation.  Soon enough cars will be able to drive by algorithm, which brings a whole host of implications.

The other museum we visited was the Cinema Museum in a very large building in central Turin.  The Museum was filled with early concepts of projected entertainment, from shadow puppets to magic lanterns.  With the discovery of photography, and learning about the persistence of vision, moving pictures became a medium to itself.  The museum is overflowing with bits of costume from film history, there's an original script from "Casablanca", and the original alien costume from Ridley Scott's "Alien".

We also got to ride to the top of the museum in a tiny glass elevator.  From the top we could see all of Turin, and hints of the Alps behind a thick layer of fog.  In the skyline there were a few modern looking skyscrapers.  I will say these northern cities of Italy remind me more of the US in style.  They are more active and less destinations for tourists.  It's hard to say what the future of Italy is.  There is certainly value in transforming a city like Rome into a giant museum, like it seems to be doing.  But there is also value in emulating the largest economy in the world.