Think Turin and you think industry — the heartland of the Italian economy, a manufacturing titan that put the T in Fiat (as in Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino). But this is not Dagenham with an Italian accent.

Turin is, quite simply, the most magnificent baroque city in Europe. Much of what you see today was created in its golden age, when the ruling dynasty, the Savoyards, flashed and flaunted their imperial prowess. It is a place of palaces, grand boulevards, arcaded streets and elegant squares.

But the reasons to go extend beyond the magnificent setting. You can look forward to outstanding museums, historic cafes, Italy’s best contemporary art and some of its best cuisine. Turin will fill your weekend just as richly as the country’s premier-league tourist cities.

Shrouded in mystery: the most important object in Christendom, the Holy Shroud, is currently housed in the cathedral of San Giovanni Battista, to the left of the altar. Not that there’s anything to see: the last ostensione took place in 2000, and there’s no word from the Vatican on when the next will occur.

In the meantime, you can step into San Lorenzo church — a super-baroque extravagance of angels, cherubs, marble, stucco and semiprecious stones — take the unmarked door on the right and see a copy of the real thing. For a fuller story, visit the Sindone museum (00 39-011 436 5832).

Museum musts: Turin has museums devoted to marionettes and mountains, Martini and motor cars, but there are two-and-a-bit weekend essentials. The Egyptian Museum (011 561 7776) is the biggest in the world outside Cairo, with mummies, statues, sarco- phaguses, papyrus scrolls, amulets — even bread and soup taken to the afterlife.

Most of the artefacts were scooped up by a 19th-century archeologist, Bernardino Dro- vetti, and top crowd-pullers include the 4,000-year-old body of a woman, a black granite statue of Ramses II and Queen Nefertari’s knees.

Palazzo Carignano, just across the road, has a museum devoted to the Risorgimento (011 562 1147), the history of united Italy. It’s a rather fusty old repository, but worth a peek to see the chapel-like room where the first parliament sat: the birthplace of modern Italy.

Mole Antonelliana (011 812 5658) is dedicated to cinema, and you’ll need a few hours to experience both the container and its contents. This 550ft neoclassical folly, commissioned as a synagogue but rejected by the Jewish community as both costs and height soared to the heavens, is now Turin’s architectural icon. It remained empty for decades before its recent transformation into a temple to film.

Turin is where Italian cinema was born, and the museum has magic lanterns, “what the butler saw” machines, and umpteen clips screened in mini “chapels” devoted to assorted themes. You lie on a bed to watch classic love scenes, and sit on WCs to watch Buñuel. And a glass lift whizzes you right up through the layers of galleries to a terrace, for the best views of the city.

A tip: buy a Torino Card (£11 for 48 hours), which allows free entry into more than 100 museums and galleries, as well as travel on local buses — including the hop-on, hop-off tourist service — and trams.

High art: as you might expect, given the wealth of the Savoys, Turin is well stocked with old masters. More surprisingly, the opening of several remarkable new galleries has seen it emerge as a showcase for contemporary art.

A fitting symbol of the city’s postindustrial reinvention is the conversion of the old Fiat factory at Lingotto (easy access by tram number 1). Last year, the architect Renzo Piano put a steel casket on the roof to house 25 paintings from the Agnelli Foundation (011 006 2008) — just a tiny fraction of the late entrepreneur’s private collection, including several works by Matisse and Canaletto.

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