Because Aron Asked

Oh, Yes I did spend time in Torino. It was my first city (for two months) and then my second to the last (again for two months) city I lived in during my mission.

Torino is a very nice town. Surprisingly, it is further north than Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Buffalo, New York. I remember walking home at the end of the day 9:30 pm and it would still be very light. Many people would just hang out in Piazza Carducci at that time of night, talking and whatever. It was a very different atmosphere than home. Even though it is so far north, it is not much different weather wise than Salt Lake, except for the humidity. The summers are very hot and humid. There was a period of about two weeks straight where everyday we came in for our mid-day break from noon to 2pm, there would be a big thunderstorm. And then it would stop raining by the time we were going out again. Once at night though one of these storms came through at maybe 2am. Our small apartment had a typical balcony. Very small with an articulated shutter type thing that came down in runners so you could shut up the apartment very securely. They were sort of like the store front pull down doors you see in New York City for locking up establishments. This storm was really wild with pretty large hail stones. Elder Wallace and I opened the storm door thingy and stepped out onto the fourth floor balcony in our skivvies to watch. For a couple of minutes the hailstones came down really hard and there was a sort of fog about 10 feet off the ground from all these hailstones hitting the street and cars and bouncing up in the air. It was loud.

My first stint in Torino was in an apartment in the South of Torino on Via Baiardi near Piazza Carducci and the Po. There were four of us Elders in that apartment. For the first month it was Me and my companion, Elder Smith, and Elders Wallace and Jorgenson. It ended up that Elder Jorgenson was from Lenore's ward. But, of course I didn't know Lenore at the time, and his dad went to UCLA with Uncle Jay. Elder Wallace was from Walnut Creek, CA, I think. Elder Wallace was a very tall man. I think he was taller than me. He also had blonde hair. We tried not to go out too often together because the Italians would think that the GEheime STAats POlizei had come to town. A unique thing happened between me an elder Wallace. When I went to Genova he stayed in Torino and took it upon himself to forward my mail to me. He would sometimes write notes on the back of the envelopes. When I left Genova he came into the same apartment. Same thing when I left Milan. He followed me around the mission, almost immediately taking up residence in the apartment I had left so that 95% of the letters I have that were forwarded, he did the forwarding. The last one I got from him was just a day or two before his mission ended.

That was my first time in Torino. I went back in the spring of 1978. This time I was in the northern part of town near the Dora river. My biggest or most persistent memory of that place was our tracting area included some sort of pastry factory because there was a constant odor like donuts in the air.