Turin

Italy

Turin, the capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, grew from the Roman colony of Augusta Taurinorum. Its Christian history includes Maximus, remembered as its first bishop around 400, whose sermons survive in large number. Turin became the capital of the Duchy of Savoy in 1563, later of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and from 1861 to 1865 served as the first capital of unified Italy. Its university, founded around 1404, educated Joseph-Louis Lagrange and counted Amedeo Avogadro and Giuseppe Peano among its professors, while the exiled French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy held a chair in the city in the early 1830s. The cathedral houses the relic known as the Shroud of Turin.