To seek to discover the essence of a nation is one of the great pleasures of travel. For many, Italy is epitomised by the magnificent historic cities that transport you back in time to the Renaissance, with their narrow alleyways of ochre and honeyed stone, their incense-filled churches, their Michelangelos and Botticellis. Pace these streets long enough and you feel as if the essence of Italianness has permeated your skin. But Italy has other faces that are unfamiliar, yet no less ‘authentic’. Indeed, in their refusal to conform to tourist-brochure stereotype, they may be more so.

Take the train from Rome, Florence or Bologna to Turin and your certainty that you know what Italy is will be shaken. This is a city that disconcerts, at first, in its difference, yielding its rewards and riches only slowly and with an appreciation of the history that shaped it. Tucked away in the extreme northwest of the peninsula, it feels like the end of a line. Most trains head back via Milan to the south; direct flights from Britain are few, and from the US non-existent. On first acquaintance, Turin does not feel remotely Italian, its yellow shuttered apartment blocks recalling southern France, its Baroque palaces a reminder of distant historical alliances with Austria. Piedmont’s geographical position makes it one of those hazy border areas, neither one thing nor another, but it was this region that, of all the miscellaneous kingdoms and dukedoms of the pre-unification Italian peninsula, was most significant in forging the Italian nation as we know it.

The Renaissance, so fundamental to popular conceptions of how ‘Italy’ looks, is little in evidence here. Turin’s centre is predominantly Baroque and neoclassical, with occasional flashes of something more aggressively modern. The first few blocks of the Via Roma, one’s first glimpse of the city from the railway station, confront the eye with uncompromising Fascist-era architecture, brutal yet with a certain sense of style. Indeed, 1930s travel posters used this street to promote Turin as a centre of sophistication and modernity. A few hundred metres on and the architecture becomes older, more ornate. This is a city of arcades – those along the Via Po allowed the king to walk the entire 1.5 kilometres from his palace to the river without having to worry about an umbrella – and of elegant squares, most of which feature at their centre a statue of a general atop a horse, poised to lead the charge in some long-forgotten battle.

But Turin has not forgotten its history. This is a not a haphazardly organised city; it was planned meticulously, on an orderly grid system, to project the ambitions of its rulers, the Savoy dynasty. As Elisabeth Vigée le Brun wrote in 1789, ‘the streets are perfectly aligned and the buildings are very uniform’, while Nikolay Gogol described Turin in 1837 as ‘second to none in magnificence… famous for the symmetry of its streets, decorum, regularity and cleanliness’.

The Savoys are scarcely one of the best-remembered European ruling houses, but they were one of the most enduring, holding power from 1003 to 1946, far longer than the Romanovs or Hohenzollerns and vastly eclipsing the rule of the Gonzagas, Sforzas or Medicis. From 1713, the House of Savoy controlled Sicily, but exchanged it for Sardinia in 1720, thereafter assuming the title Kingdom of Sardinia until 1861, though Piedmont was more familiarly used. Territory was periodically seized by the French, but when the Savoys reclaimed their land at the Congress of Vienna, they ruled an area that stretched to Nice in the west and Annecy in the north, as well as covering present-day Piedmont, Valle d’Aosta, Sardinia, and Liguria, including the key port of Genoa.

From the 16th century onwards, when Emanuele Filiberto reclaimed Piedmont from a previous French annexation, his family set about using architecture as a display of power, constructing an eye-watering number of royal residences in and around Turin. Pre-eminent was the extravagant Palazzo Reale, which boasts what is surely one of the most ostentatious interiors in Europe. There are four further palaces within the city itself and countless more castles, villas and hunting lodges in the greater metropolitan area and further into rural Piedmont. Any one is breathtaking, and not least the 17th-century Reggia di Venaria Reale, a sort of Italian Versailles that was later seized by Napoleon’s troops, converted into military barracks and eventually allowed to fall into disrepair, only being restored in the 1990s. Although spartan in its furnishings today, it is a dazzling architectural treasure box with its long chequerboard-floored, light-filled galleria grande, its cavernous chapel, vast formal gardens, and elegant surrounding streets that were conceived as part of a unified vision in urban planning. To the eastern side of the city, the Savoy princes and kings continue to exert their presence, looking down even in death from the Basilica of Superga, a hilltop church with sweeping views of the city and the Alps.

Perhaps the most unusual looking of Turin’s many royal residences is the Palazzo Carignano, a curious redbrick palace made of terracotta tiles with a decoration picked out in stars. Its striking elliptical façade is topped with an enormous bronze plaque announcing this to have been the birthplace of Vittorio Emanuele II, the Savoy monarch who trumped them all by becoming the first ruler of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The Chamber of Deputies sat here and it would have been a building familiar to Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, the new nation’s prime minister, and indeed to Giuseppe Verdi, who served as a parliamentary deputy.

Streets in Turin were renamed after all three of these men, and also after other figures of political note, including the great nationalist activist Giuseppe Mazzini; Giovanni Giolitti, five-times prime minister; and the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a keen observer of Italian industrialisation and staunch opponent of Mussolini. These were not any old national heroes: all had close connections with Piedmont. And what of the ubiquitous bronze generals and statesmen? Giuseppe Garibaldi (Corso Cairoli), Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora (Piazza Bodoni), Massimo D’Azeglio (Corso Vittorio Emanuele II): these men, too, were vital figures in the creation of the modern state, the latter coining the phrase: ‘We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.’

The longer you linger in Turin, Italy’s first capital city, the closer the attention you pay to its landmarks, monuments and street names, the better you appreciate its foundational role in forging a nation. Sometimes, you begin to realise, one must look to the periphery of a country to discover its heart.