Where via Po ends, Turin opens onto the river: piazza Vittorio Veneto is the city's great balcony on the Po, with the church of the Gran Madre and the hill as its backdrop. Your treasure map takes you to the square where the Torinesi have been meeting for two centuries.
For centuries there was only the open ground outside the Porta di Po, the city's eastern gate, among boatmen, fishermen and the road to Chieri. When the bastions fell in the Napoleonic era, space was freed for a monumental square. The final design was by the Ticino-born architect Giuseppe Frizzi, who from 1825 enclosed it with neoclassical buildings and continuous arcades, joined to the Baroque exedra of via Po. The five-arched stone bridge was built between 1810 and 1813; on the opposite bank the Gran Madre di Dio, inaugurated in 1831, closes the view. Today it is the place for festivals, concerts, marches and evening strolls towards the Murazzi.
