Grugliasco

The name says two different things, and Grugliasco chose the second. To the linguists it is a prediale — Gruglascum, from the Roman colonist Currelio, when the Romans squared out the countryside west of Turin. To others it comes from the cranes, the gru, that once stopped here on migration; and when in 1613 the community gave itself a coat of arms, it put the crane on it. The bird has stayed ever since: there is still a Palio della Gru. The village, though, had no water: no rivers, no streams, and it grew slowly until in the fifteenth century a bealera was brought from the Dora Riparia, passing through Rivoli and Collegno and splitting here into two horns.

With the water came silk: the spinning mills lined up along the canal, and that street is still called via dei Filatoi. Then the mulberry sickened, the French took the market, and the silk was over. There remain the fifteenth-century civic tower, built for defence and turned first into a Chappe telegraph after Napoleon passed and then into the bell tower of San Cassiano; the seventeenth-century farmsteads scattered towards Turin; and Villa Il Maggiordomo, built by the majordomo of the House of Savoy, which so resembles Palazzo Carignano that some attribute it to Guarino Guarini. Today Grugliasco is Turin's green campus — agriculture and veterinary medicine among the farmsteads — and, which nobody expects, one of Italy's capitals of contemporary circus: the Parco Le Serre has a school all year and an international festival in summer. Turin is a tram ride away.