Centro & Quadrilatero

The historic centre is the only part of Turin where you can live inside the Savoy city itself — the grid the dukes laid out, the arcades they built so the court could cross town in the rain, the piazzas that still set the price of every other address.

Stock here is almost entirely period: piano nobile apartments with four-metre ceilings, frescoed cornices and windows tall enough to make a north-facing room bright. The Quadrilatero Romano, the tight Roman street pattern north-west of Piazza Castello, was rough until the late nineties and is now the densest concentration of restaurants in the city.

What you trade for that is space and parking. Very few buildings have a garage, courtyards are small, and anything with a private terrace commands a premium that has not softened in a decade.