Turin day 2

We began our second day in Turin with chocolate. The Turin visitor center sells a "ChocoPass" with coupons (on display in Rob's hot little hands) that allowed us to visit 8 chocolate shops to taste hot chocolate, tortes, and the local specialty called gianduiotto (a kind of prism-shaped chocolate with hazlenut), along with other various pralines and other treats. Chocolate is big business here and the locals take it very seriously. Each shop, packed with locals with holiday orders, had its own way of colorfully displaying their products. It was fun to sneak in for some sweets and listen in on the gab among the Torinesi, since you could tell that these were family businesses and everyone knew each other. One of our favorites was La Perla di Torino (http://www.laperladitorino.it/), a store that, in addition to making its own tasty treats, functioned as a sort of mega chocolate store with products of other well-known makers (e.g. Lindt) for sale. And of course we couldn't have chocolate without coffee so we made sure to have a few espressos along with way, courtesy of Turin's (and Italy's, perhaps) best coffee company, Lavazza. We stopped at four shops on this day and still have some of the chocolate left over. Delicious!

Following a few chocolate stops we made our way to the Egyptian Museum. This collection is the second most important collection of Egyptian antiquities outside of Cairo, so they claim. The next photo shows a very colorful sarcophagus and Rob explains that Egyptian antiquities are preserved so well because of the lack of moisture in Egypt.

The room in the photo below held most of the major sculpture. Many of them are made from diorite which is a dark grey/black stone, so it was quite a change from the bright white marble we're used to seeing in Greece.

The sphinx I stopped to pose with was quite a sight. It's a body of a lion with the head of a man and it served as a protective figure in sacred temples of the gods.

Since 1578, The Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist (below) has housed the Shroud of Turin, the linen bearing the image of a man who died from crucifixion and widely believed to be the image of Christ. The shroud itself is not visible but lays in a long rectangular box covered with a cloth and a replica shroud with the image of the face hangs above the box for viewers to see. Religious scholars still debate whether or not the shroud is authentic and some have even argued that the image is a later forgery. But these debates do not stop Catholics and Christians generally from making the pilgrimage to visit the shroud.

Finally, we ended our evening with a trip to the Cinema Museum housed inside the Mole Antonelliana, the architectural symbol of Turin first conceived as a synagogue in 1862 by Allesandro Antonelli but eventually came into the hands of the Italian state which housed various museums in it. Since 2000 the film museum has been here (http://www.museonazionaledelcinema.org/index.php?l=en).

The Cinema Museum is a fascinating tour of the origins of moving pictures, from simple shadow puppets to the use of the camera obscura to cartoons all the way to modern film production, with plenty of helpful illustrations, hands-on material, a cafe/restaurant and a swanky giftshop with books, movies, you name it. In the center of the monument is a large open space devoted to film screening, and a glass elevator zips visitors up from the ground floor of the monument past the upper levels to the top with panoramic views of Turin and the Alps (the first photo we posted of Turin was from the top of the Mole). We had a great time here, and as you can see from the photo below, we ended up in a scene from the Matrix, alongside Keanu Reeves! The Italian tourists alongside us kept laughing at this video, as it was displayed again on a larger screen for all to see.