Canavese. Canavese is a corner of Piedmont in Turin's province, with sober tones, never too noisy, rich in deep historic and environmental worth: an area of special tourist interest, suited to those who wants to deeply savour a land faraway from huge massive circuits. The origins of Canavese date back to that time when only nature's forces could "draw" the region, and they grew stronger during the centuries thanks to the people's laboriousness, who traced its history. Today the economy of the towns of Canavese looks towards an highlight future. (Copyright © 2000 - 2002 ATL Canavese e Valli di Lanzo All rights reserved)

The Castels. The unquiet past times left in the Canavese an incredible richness of castles, towers, manor houses and shelters: there's no village, it doesn't matter how little, that does not show something of ancient origin. Some castles are opened to visitors, and they're quite close one to another. Of special interest are some ancient villages that still preserve the original structure with traces of ancient shelters, called "Ricetti", such as the villages of Ozegna, Oglianico and Pavone. (Copyright © 2000 - 2002 ATL Canavese e Valli di Lanzo All rights reserved)

Nature and Sports. The Canavese gives the opportunity to practice almost any kind of sport, enjoying at the same time the marvellous naturalistic scenarios such as in the Valchiusella and Valle Sacra, the unspoiled environments such as the one of the Gran Paradiso Park, the peaceful beauty of its lakes and streams. Inside the morainic amphitheatre of the Serra hill-system there are many lakes of glacial origins. The biggest one is the Viverone Lake , well known summer resort that is also a place of great archaeological and geological interest, because some important prehistoric evidences were found on its banks. Moreover on the Viverone Lake it is possible to sail and windsurf. (Copyright © 2000 - 2002 ATL CANAVESE e valli del Lanzo All rights reserved)

The Carnevale di Ivrea and the Orange Battles. The Carnival of Ivrea is the only Carnival in the world which has a real plot and tells a story in which the protagonists are not mask-characters, but ideal figures, the symbols of anarchic values and actors of ancient events. The first goes back to the Middle Ages, when Federico Barbarossa installed the tyrant Raineri di Biandrate as lord of the town. For a long time the violence and abuse of power exasperated the people, who in 1194 rose up and destroyed the tyrant's castle, the symbol of oppression. In popular tradition, Raineri and Guglielmo become a single tyrant, who in-keeping with the custom of the time, claimed the right to practice "jus primae noctis",in other words to spend the wedding night with the brides. Until Violetta, the beautiful daughter of a miller, rebelled against the lord's will, cut off his head with a dagger and showed it to the people gathered beneath the castle walls. There followed a popular rebellion, which led to the destruction of the castle and which is today symbolised by the Battle of Oranges played out between the orange throwers on foot representing the rebels and those on the carts representing the tyrant's guards. (Copyright © 2004 Consorzio per l'Organizzazione dello Storico Carnevale di Ivrea - All rights reserved)

Parco del Gran Paradiso.Gran Paradiso national park, Italy's first national park, with a surface area of 70.000 hectares, covers the Gran Paradiso range, an area characterized by every alpine environment, from the rural landscapes of the valley floor to forests of conifers, from alpine pastures to high route environments. The park may be visited all year round : in summer you can walk along high route paths, with marvellous views of the mountains of the range and exciting encounters with the wildlife, all accompanied by an explosion of flowers; autumn is the season of colour, when the larches are tinged with orange and stand out against the white of the first snow; in winter you can go cross-country skiing or on short excursions with snowshoes in the woods, looking for animal tracks; in spring it is not unusual to meet chamois and ibex as they come down into the valleys looking for newly-grown grass. (Copyright © 2004 Ente Parco Nazionale Gran Paradiso - All rights reserved)

The City of Turin.The Emperor Augustus had Turin built two thousand years ago as a camp for the troops he sent to protect the Roman state's northern borders. It was not until the fifteenth century, when the Savoy dukedom achieved the political and administrative unification of Piedmont's various provinces that Turin, chosen as the Dukedom's official residence, began to consolidate its importance. While it was Savoy government policy to relaunch Turin's economic, manufacturing and cultural life and to create a city to match the great capitals of Europe, the Dukedom's greatest expenditure was on defence and on the strategic reorganisation of the Savoy state. The arch. Francesco Paciotto was called in from Urbino to repair the medieval fort and start work on the construction of the Citadel , a bastion-supported structure with a star-shaped layout, of which the main gate, known as "Il Mastio" (the Keep), still stand. Piedmont also enjoyed economic growth thanks to the policies of Cavour: the expanding manufacturing system increasingly turned to factory-based industry and capitalist organisation. The promotion of private enterprise also led landowners to engage in an orgy of speculative building works that was only controlled by the imposition of customs boundaries in 1853. (Copyright © 2004 Comune di Torino - All rights reserved)