It’s late on a summer Sunday evening in Turin, a city of one million people located in the northern region of Piedmont. I’m seated in a bar called Affini, in the San Salvario district, on a mission of sorts. I’m sampling the “Nuvolari” – a cocktail created by one of Turin’s foremost mixologists, Michele Marzella – in honour of iconic Italian racer Tazio Nuvolari. With me is restaurateur David Pinto, owner of Anselmo Torino 1857, an artisanal vermouth distiller.

“The Torinese are hard-working people,” he tells me in Italian. “The mindset is industrial; in the 1960s, the automobile factories attracted all kinds of immigrants from all over Italy to Turin. They like to create and invent.” Turin is Italy’s Motor City. Like Detroit, it is inextricably tied to the automobile. Although its days as a mecca for automobile design and manufacturing have passed, it retains the vitality and ambition that made it the first capital of a unified Italy and the headquarters for FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino).