The most important room in this museum was not built to be a museum: it is an air-raid shelter, and it lies under the building. Turin was bombed at length because of its factories, and that basement is part of the visit. You go down into it, and the rest of the display makes better sense.
What to see
The museum is called diffuse because it is not all in here. In via del Carmine is the interpretation centre, with a multimedia display that tells the story of the city from the racial laws of 1938 to the coming into force of the republican Constitution, by way of the war, the occupation and the Resistance. The rest of the museum is a network of places scattered across Turin: memorial stones, shelters, courtyards, plaques, which say nothing on their own and which the centre teaches you to read.
The building is palazzo San Daniele, one of the eighteenth-century military quarters, now part of the Polo del Novecento. The same block houses the Piedmontese institute for the history of the Resistance, the national film archive of the Resistance and the international study centre dedicated to Primo Levi, who was from Turin. The museum opened in 2003.
Visiting
The entrance is in via del Carmine, in the Roman quarter. It is a municipal museum with its own hours and closing days, and some parts of the route, the shelter included, are visited at set times or by booking: it is worth asking first. An hour and a half.
Our editors' tip
Go down into the shelter and walk to the far end, where the panels stop. In those rooms there is almost nothing to see: walls, benches, an air plant. It is the part nobody arranged, and it is the part that stays with you. Try counting how many people would fit sitting down, and then imagine how many hours they spent there, in the dark, waiting for it to end.
