Museo Lavazza

About this place

At the entrance they hand you a coffee cup instead of a leaflet. There is a chip in its base, and it is the key to the whole museum: set it down at any station and the screen wakes up and tells you its chapter. The idea is almost comically simple, but it captures exactly what separates this place from every other museum in Turin — a building designed to be touched and heard rather than contemplated from behind a velvet rope. The story starts in 1895, when Luigi Lavazza took over a small grocery shop on Via San Tommaso, a few steps from Piazza Castello, and began blending beans himself until the blend became an industry. The museum now sits inside the company headquarters, the Nuvola complex, opened in 2018 on the site of an old power station in the Aurora district and designed by the architect Cino Zucchi. Five galleries run in sequence — Casa, Fabbrica, Piazza, Atelier, Universo — from the coffee tree through blending and roasting to the rituals of the Italian bar. The best of them is the Atelier: sixty years of work the company commissioned from artists, photographers and film directors, from the Carosello characters to the Lavazza calendars, hung together so that it reads less like advertising than like a history of Italian taste. The route closes in the Universo, a room of wraparound projection. Under the building there is a surprise with nothing to do with coffee. During the 2014 excavation, the remains of the early Christian basilica of San Secondo, 4th to 5th century, emerged along with burials around it and a 2nd-century funerary stele. The architects redesigned the foundations to preserve it, and the finds are shown in a long case under the glazing along the route. One warning: visiting the archaeological area is a separate guided tour on a separate ticket (five euros alone, fifteen combined with the museum), it runs only by advance booking and only for a minimum of fifteen participants, and it is not suitable for anyone with mobility difficulties. It is not included with a standard ticket and it does not run on demand. To be honest, this museum does not justify a trip to Turin. If you have only one day, the Egyptian Museum and the Mole Antonelliana come well ahead of it, and each has its own page and its own separate ticket here. But on a second day, or with children whose patience for painted ceilings has run out, it is the easiest and most cheerful hour in the city. Allow 60 to 90 minutes. The closing tasting is a paid extra booked separately rather than part of the ticket, though there is a bar in the complex if you simply want an espresso. And the location is more useful to Arab travellers than most Turin sights: Porta Palazzo, the largest open-air market in Europe, is about fifteen minutes on foot, ringed by North African and Middle Eastern restaurants and halal butchers, and it shows you a Turin utterly unlike the arcaded centre.