The Fiat Building and a Race Track on the Roof

Our home in Torino over the last week has been at NH Lingetto. A hotel that has retrofitted into the old 5 story high Fiat office buildings and right next to the convention centre for the Slow Food Show which is held in what was the original ground floor Fiat construction factory.

The Fiat office building is just sooooo long and vast, and our room just as vast. Each of the rooms fit in-between the 8m spaced concrete columns and are 5m tall. These spaces make up the original simplistic industrial revolution building of its era.
We have wall to wall and floor to ceiling windows over looking a courtyard garden below and looks onto the other parallel section of the old Fiat office buildings.

The Fiat factory started in the 1920's and ran at this location up until the mid 1980's.
The original office building section now have all been converted into 2 hotels and a huge shopping mall and several convention centres. It is so long and it wasn't until I found out that on the top of the original Fiat office building was the original race track for testing and racing the Fiats. Hence it length and being in two parallel section forming a huge race track 6 stories up.

Mr Fiat was a boy with his toys ... a factory, his home and his race track on the roof.... I know quite a few today that would have loved being in his shoes.

The engineering alone that was needed to create the 6 story concrete road ramp in the 20's that got the Fiat from the factory on the ground floor to the roof race track was a amazing piece of concrete structure, let alone the roof race track itself ...

So a cute little red Fiat 750 sports car that was my very first car when I was 16 would have done a lap or two around these tracks, so I just had to do a lap on foot too...