TURIN, Italy — The stadium that Mussolini built is fitted now with retractable plexiglass seats. Steel and glass are everywhere.
Next door, in a neighborhood better known for abandoned red-brick factories, is a sparkling new ice hockey rink (even though people here don't really play hockey). Renowned architect Arata Isozaki designed it.
And a few miles beyond, the old Fiat plant has been replaced by fancy shops and Turin's first state-of-the-art five-star hotel.
Playing host to the Olympics tends to do this to cities. They undergo miraculous, multimillion-dollar transformations; even the dowdiest of burgs become Cinderellas. But does it last? Does the overhaul bring fame and fortune to the host once the Games are over?
That is what Turin is banking on, as have so many other cities. Many here hope that when the XX Winter Olympics commence this week, Turin's image as a gray postindustrial city, the home of Fiat but not much else, will be irreversibly altered.
"We want to make Turin known for something more," said Mercedes Bresso, president of the Piedmont region, which is home to Turin. She spoke recently in her office overlooking the 16th century Piazza Castello as workers busily erected a television soundstage. "We want to make the world see that Turin is not the Detroit of Italy -- not just a factory town, but Italy's first capital, with palazzi and mountains."
Mayor Sergio Chiamparino sounded a similar note. "Turin is not like Rome or Florence or Venice. But it is a good, second-category tourist city," he said in an interview last year. "The city is changing. This is a revolution for Turin."
Turin today is attempting to reinvent itself, just as it has through the ages. For centuries, the Alpine city by the Po River was the bastion of the Savoy dynasty, the mostly French dukes and kings who ruled northern Italy from the Middle Ages. And it was the center of the Risorgimento movement, which unified Italy in 1861. Turin was the nation's first capital, until that honor was moved to Florence and later Rome.
The city found its new calling as the heart of Italy's manufacturing base, a symbol of the country's "economic miracle" after the destruction brought by World War II. Central to that was Fiat, a maker of small, cheap cars. The booming business attracted hundreds of thousands of workers from more impoverished areas, and when the company's fortunes declined in the 1980s and '90s, this city of nearly 1 million people was again thrown into crisis, forced to look for a new identity and a new livelihood.
