Turin after Fiat: Lingotto, Mirafiori and what you can visit

Fiat no longer builds cars at Lingotto, and the building that made Turin an industrial capital now holds a shopping centre, a university, a congress centre and a museum stacked on its roof. Three of Lingotto Fiere's four exhibition halls sit inside the former plant, and its Pavilion 2 keeps the post-industrial look it had when the space housed the factory's press shop, on the operator's own account (Lingotto Fiere, Gli spazi, checked 15 September 2026). That is the honest shape of Fiat tourism in Turin. It is a city that reused its factory rather than preserving it, so what you can visit is a rooftop, two museums and an archive, not a production line.

What Lingotto was built to do

Lingotto was Fiat's attempt at an American-style plant, decided by the company's board in 1915, with construction beginning in July 1916 (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Lingotto, checked 15 September 2026). The design is credited to Giacomo Mattè Trucco, and Turismo Torino e Provincia dates the building to the 1920s as Fiat's first plant of its kind (Turismo Torino e Provincia, Pista 500, checked 15 September 2026). The two dates are not in conflict: one is the decision and groundbreaking, the other the decade in which the finished complex took shape.

The single feature that matters to a visitor is the roof. Fiat used the rooftop circuit to test the cars built in the plant below, and the spiral ramps that still stand inside the building existed to carry those cars up to it. That is the mechanism behind the thing you will walk on: a track placed on top of a factory so that finished vehicles could be driven straight out of production and onto it.

Piano's intervention added two elements you can identify from the roof: the Scrigno, the casket-like structure that houses the Agnelli collection, and the Bolla, a fully glazed meeting room. The rooftop track and the spiral ramps were deliberately kept.

Walking the rooftop test track

Pista 500 is the former test track, converted in 2019 into a rooftop garden that you walk rather than drive. The redesign was by the Turin studio Camerana&Partners with the landscape architect Cristiana Ruspa, and the track now carries temporary contemporary art installations curated by the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turismo Torino e Provincia, Pista 500, checked 15 September 2026). The museum describes the result as a panoramic walkway through art (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Pista 500, checked 15 September 2026).

Access is through the museum, and the ticket you choose decides how much of the roof and the galleries you get. The table compares the three full-price options published for the Pinacoteca Agnelli at Via Nizza 230.

Reduced rates of EUR 10.00 and EUR 8.00 apply to over-65s, groups of eight or more and visitors aged 13 to 25; entry is free for under-12s, visitors with disabilities, Abbonamento Musei holders and Torino+Piemonte Card holders. A lower full price of EUR 6.00 is listed for 15 September to 28 October 2026, the window in which no temporary exhibition is running (Turismo Torino e Provincia, Pinacoteca Agnelli, checked 15 September 2026). Prices are set by the museum and change with the exhibition programme, so confirm the current tariff before you buy.

Casa FIAT is the reason the gallery ticket matters to anyone interested in the company rather than the paintings. It is a permanent exhibition route on the Lingotto roof that tells Fiat's history through images, objects and documents, deliberately interwoven with the story of the factory underneath it (Pinacoteca Agnelli, CASA FIAT and Turismo Torino e Provincia, Design e memoria, both checked 15 September 2026).

Where the Fiat archive lives

The Centro Storico Fiat, not Lingotto, is where Fiat's own historical material is kept and shown. It occupies an Art Nouveau building at Via Gabriele Chiabrera 20 that was the first expansion, in 1907, of the Corso Dante workshops in which the company was founded, and it is run as part of the Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile rather than by the carmaker (MAUTO, Centro Storico Fiat, checked 15 September 2026).

What is on display is more varied than "Fiat made cars" suggests. The museum lists the 3½ HP, the first car Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino produced; the 1923 Eldridge Mefistofele record car; the 1919 Fiat 702 tractor and the 18BL truck used by Italian troops in the First World War; the Littorina railcar of the 1930s; and a G91 fighter designed by Giuseppe Gabrielli and later adopted by NATO. The current temporary exhibition, Memory and conflicts, is built from the company's own holdings on strikes, disputes and leaflets collected across the twentieth century, some of it gathered by staff whose job was corporate security.

The archive in the same building is not a walk-in facility. It holds over 9,000 linear metres of paper documents, 400,000 technical drawings, 5,000 books and magazines, more than 6 million images and 200 hours of historical footage, including the working papers of Dante Giacosa, the engineer behind the Topolino, the 600 and the 500. Consultation is by appointment only, arranged by email, with a published fee schedule.

MAUTO is not a Fiat museum

The Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile is a national museum of the car, and Fiat is one brand inside it rather than its subject. Its collection runs to over 200 original cars from 80 different brands, from late nineteenth-century steam vehicles to racing cars and prototypes (MAUTO, Plan your visit, checked 15 September 2026). The building itself was funded largely by several manufacturers together, Alfa Romeo, Autobianchi, Fiat, Lancia, OM and Spa, which is the structural reason it never became a single company's shrine (MAUTO, The History, checked 15 September 2026).

Its own timeline is unusually specific. A City of Turin resolution of 19 July 1933 established the Automobile Museum, conceived and assembled by Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia; it opened to the public in 1939 in temporary rooms under the stands of the Municipal Stadium, where admission cost 1 lira and only 73 of its 181 pieces could be displayed. The permanent building by Amedeo Albertini on Corso Unità d'Italia was completed in autumn 1960, and the museum reopened in 2011 after four years of closure, remodelled by Cino Zucchi with a layout by François Confino (MAUTO, The History, checked 15 September 2026).

Practical details are simple. The museum is at Corso Unità d'Italia 40, open Monday 10:00-14:00 and Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-19:00 with last admission an hour before closing. Full admission is EUR 18.00, reduced EUR 15.00 for over-65s, 18 to 25-year-olds and groups of ten or more, EUR 8.00 for ages 6 to 17, EUR 3.00 for schools, and free for under-6s, ICOM members, disabled visitors with a companion and certified teachers.

Mirafiori and what is not visitable

Mirafiori, the plant that gave Turin its postwar scale, is not a visitor attraction and no public tour of it is published. Turismo Torino e Provincia's own guide to the Lingotto, Mirafiori and Santa Rita districts lists nothing industrial in Mirafiori at all: it points visitors to the Mausoleo della Bela Rosin, a neoclassical scaled-down Pantheon designed by Angelo Demezzi in 1886 for Rosa Vercellana, and to PAV - Parco d'Arte Vivente, a contemporary art centre on a former industrial site of about 23,000 m² (Turismo Torino e Provincia, Lingotto, Mirafiori e Santa Rita, checked 15 September 2026).

The gap is worth stating plainly because it changes how you plan. There is no Fiat factory tour in Turin in the sense that Volkswagen or Ferrari visitors expect. What the city offers instead is a decommissioned factory you can stand on, a corporate archive you can book, and a national collection in which Fiat is one thread.

A half day, in order

Three sites make a workable half day, and Turin's Metro Line 1 connects all of them. Start on the Lingotto roof while the light is good, drop to the Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile, then take the metro north for the Centro Storico Fiat if it is a Tuesday to Sunday.

The order matters more than the timing. The Pinacoteca closes on Mondays while MAUTO opens on Monday mornings only, so a Monday visitor gets the car museum and nothing else on this list.

What this guide does not cover

This guide covers what a visitor can enter, and deliberately stops at the factory gate. It does not cover the Lingotto shopping centre, its hotels, its university spaces or the congress programme, nor the public fairs held by Lingotto Fiere at Via Nizza 294, which are separately ticketed events with their own calendars, among them the Salone Internazionale del Libro and Artissima.

It also makes no claim about three things we could not verify from a primary source: any visitor arrangement at Mirafiori, the Mirafiori Motor Village showroom, and the exact year Renzo Piano's conversion completed, which two official pages date differently. Ticket prices and opening hours here were read on 15 September 2026 and are set by each venue; the Pinacoteca's in particular move with its exhibition calendar. Check the venue page on the day you book, and if the galleries are in a changeover week, buy the EUR 4.00 Pista 500 ticket and keep the roof.