The unexpected Turin

Behind this piece of chocolate is a choice. And behind every choice, a reason worth telling.

We included a piece by TOC in a gift for our partners — the people who make possible what we do every day: crafting tailor-made journeys with responsibility, attention and a deep respect for detail. Turin is where TOC works. It is also where we are based — which is perhaps the simplest explanation of why this choice felt right.

This is an invitation to understand the thinking behind that choice. And, with it, our way of seeing Turin and the wider Piedmont.

TOC: a piece of the city

In Piedmontese dialect, toch means "a piece." TOC lives up to the word: small-batch chocolate made in Turin, where craft precision meets a playful imagination.

Founded in 2011 by Maria and Paolo in Borgo Nuovo, TOC works with carefully selected cacao and simple, natural ingredients, keeping the process close to the hands that shape it, with no industrial shortcuts.

As a Benefit Company, TOC builds purpose into the business: thoughtful sourcing, packaging designed to be recycled and reused, and a work culture rooted in the belief that relationships matter as much as recipes.

Turin has been told fewer times than it deserves. We think that is precisely the point.

Not the city that performs for visitors, but the one that continues quietly on its own terms. A royal capital that never became a destination — and in that restraint, kept something most cities have lost. The courtyard behind the portico. The pasticceria that has no sign. The collector who opens his archive to those who ask the right question.

We design journeys built on this logic: where what is left undiscovered matters as much as what is celebrated. Every moment chosen deliberately; every partner selected for shared values as much as for excellence.

Turin does not reveal itself to everyone. Only to those who know how to look.

Where chocolate became an art

Chocolate did not reach Turin by accident. It arrived at court - through the Spanish connections of the House of Savoy, in the seventeenth century, when cacao was still a luxury of the nobility and its preparation a matter of ceremony. The Duchy adopted it early, and Turin adopted it completely: by the eighteenth century, the city had developed a guild of master chocolatiers who elevated the craft to a form of applied art.

The gianduiotto was born of necessity and became a revelation. During Napoleon's continental blockade, cacao imports were severely restricted. Turin's chocolatiers, rather than reducing production, turned to what the land offered in abundance: Tonda Gentile delle Langhe, the hazelnut variety grown in the hills to the south. Mixed with the remaining cacao, it produced something no one had anticipated: a smooth, round, complex chocolate. Scarcity became invention. The compromise became the canon.

Today, Piedmont produces nearly a quarter of Italy's chocolate. The tradition is not a heritage to be preserved behind glass: it is alive, practiced daily, held in the hands of those who still believe that the gesture of making is itself a form of meaning.

The historic cafés

Turin's cafés are not places of passage. They are institutions: rooms where history was discussed, where the Risorgimento was imagined, where intellectuals and nobles sat at the same marble tables in a city that had decided early to take its pleasures seriously.

The oldest of them has been making its bicerin since 1763 — a layered drink of espresso, drinking chocolate and milk cream, served without stirring, a ritual as precise as any liturgy. Around the corner, a café that opened its doors in 1780 still preserves its original interiors: gilded mirrors, red velvet, the particular hush of a room where time moves differently. On Piazza San Carlo, beneath the arcades that locals have walked for centuries, two more historic salons face each other across the most elegant square in northern Italy, their display cases still filled with the same gianduiotti, paste di meliga and torrone.

We enter these places with respect: not as tourists, but as guests who have been expected — for a private tasting, a table before opening, or a quiet hour in rooms that belong to the city's deepest memory.

Chocolate, after hours.

In a historic chocolate atelier in Turin, in one of the city’s most quietly elegant quarters, a young maître chocolatier works with the same hands-on rigour as the artisans who came before him. The laboratory is original. The equipment is unchanged. The visit unfolds as a conversation during a tour of the production space, followed by a chocolate tasting in Turin that can be paired with Vermouth on request.

The experience is shaped around the guest. There is no standard script. Only an exchange about cacao, about the history of Turin chocolate tradition, and about what it means to produce artisan chocolate in Turin today.

More than a tasting, it is a moment of exchange.

The gianduiotto, made by hand

There is a Turin that lives in the gesture of making — not in the display case, but at the marble slab, in the precise movement of wrist and spatula that has defined this Turin chocolate tradition since the nineteenth century.

In a historic gelateria in the heart of Turin, the art of the gianduiotto and gelato is taught and practiced by specialists in the culinary and sensory education of Piedmont. Hands on, historically grounded, and unexpectedly moving for those who did not expect to discover something lasting about hazelnut and chocolate in a single afternoon.

We step into these places quietly, as welcomed guests.

Vermouth, as argument

Turin gave the aperitivo its form. The Vermouth produced here — bitter, botanical, precise — remains among the most complex and historically significant drinks in the European tradition. In a private space in the city, a specialist has built an experience around this understanding: not a simple tasting, but a seminar conducted in his atelier or in a location chosen by the guest.

Personalised, original, and deeply embedded in the city's culture of the aperitivo. A Piedmontese ritual, explained by someone who has spent years reflecting on why it matters.

Private openings

Turin was power, culture, and diplomacy. Its palaces and museums were not built for spectacle alone, but for a life conducted at the highest register — where art was an argument, and beauty was a language of its own.

Some of these places are not simply visited. Their doors open before the day begins, or after it ends.

At half past eight in the morning, the Egyptian Museum belongs to almost no one: the second most significant collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts on earth, still silent, the light arriving slowly across the statuary. A private breakfast before opening hours, then a guided visit in near-silence. This is the kind of encounter that changes the way one reads a city.

In the evening, one of Turin's most refined baroque palaces becomes something else entirely: exclusive, theatrical, charged with three centuries of the city's most consequential decisions. An aperitivo in rooms that are not normally entered. History is not displayed here: it is experienced.

The living hills

The hills are not a backdrop. They are an ecosystem, an economy, a community.

The Roero sits on the left bank of the Tanaro, forty minutes from Turin, older than the Langhe and less visited. It grows Arneis and Nebbiolo on sandy soils that predate the current geological era. It hides truffle grounds that are not mapped. It holds stone villages where life still revolves around the wine cellar and the vegetable garden, where the families who welcome guests have been doing so, in one form or another, for generations.

A truffle hunt with a trifolau and his dog in the woodlands above Montà — white truffle from October, black truffle year-round, perhaps followed by a picnic in the field. Or at night: torchlight and silence, the particular atmosphere of the forest after dark. A private visit to an estate in Canale d'Alba where the Arneis grape was brought back from near-extinction through decades of committed viticulture. A morning in Castagnito starting with a table set between the barrels.

We choose partners who are part of this ecosystem. Not by declaration, but by daily practice. TOC is one of them.

Explore with intention

Curated travel. Two words that only mean something when earned through years of listening to places, to the people who inhabit them, and to travellers who are ready to go deeper. We work with those who collect experiences. Who know that the best journeys ask something in return: attention, curiosity, a willingness to slow down. That is the kind of travel we believe in, and the kind we design across Italy and Switzerland, one journey at a time. As a Benefit Company, we measure our work not only by the journeys we create, but by the impact we leave behind: on the communities we work with, on the landscapes we move through, and on the cultural heritage we have a responsibility to protect.

The unexpected awaits