In Torino/Turin, we're having a Mole/Heap of fun

TORINO — After spending two days in a place occupied at various times by Napoleon, Hannibal, Julius Caesar and Benito Mussolini, I am now prepared, in true American style, to provide a comprehensive profile on the northern Italian metropolis that has taken over from Salt Lake City as host to the Olympic Winter Games.

First, there's the name, which has caused more than a little confusion. In the English language, on maps, in encyclopedias, in tour guides, etc., the city is known as Turin. Torino is the Italian spelling — like Roma for Rome or Firenze for Florence — and the name dates back to a couple of hundred years B.C. when a small group of Celts established a village, in the long shadow of the Alps, they called Taurasia.

It was an NBC executive, so the story goes, who decided, after Torino won the Olympics seven years ago, that as far as NBC was concerned, the city name would keep its Italianized version because it sounded more exciting.

If NBC had used the same criteria four years ago in Salt Lake City, they would have been the Citta del lago Salato 2002 Olympic Winter Games.

NBC wasn't the first American company to consider Torino a catchy name. In 1968 the Ford Motor Co. replaced its Fairlane line with its Torino line. From 1968 through 1976, Torinos were all the rage, reaching the height of their popularity when Starsky and Hutch drove one in the TV show "Starsky and Hutch." In 1977, the Torino line gave way to the LTD.

Speaking of cars, Torino is known as the Detroit of Italy because it was here that the original Torino automobile rolled off an assembly line — only we know Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino by its acronym, Fiat.

The members of the Olympic media, all 10,000 of us, by the way, are headquartered for the next three weeks in what used to be the Fiat manufacturing plant — from 1912 until a move to the suburbs in 1982. An oval test track remains on the roof that used to test Fiats and was used in the movie "The Italian Job," the 1969 original, which was shot on location in Torino/Turin.

The old Fiat building is a half-mile long. It is so huge it has comfortably swallowed the world media, including the 3,000-member NBC team, without bothering any of the tenants upstairs in Gallery Lingotto, Torino's largest shopping mall.