The Italian Job Tour & Turin's Streets

18 October 2026

If you grew up in Britain, you probably have a soft spot for The Italian Job. Michael Caine, Noël Coward, three Mini Coopers, and a city most of us couldn’t have found on a map.

I first came to Turin in 1993. All I knew about the place was that FIAT built cars here, and that the film had been shot on its streets.

The first night in Turin

By 2002 I had moved here properly, with my wife and son, into a neglected fourth-floor apartment. A few days after we arrived we went out and bought a television.

No prizes for guessing what we watched first.

There we were in the city where it was made, watching it more than thirty years on, sitting among the boxes and the dust that were slowly turning into our new life in Italy.

One location leads to another

A friend took us to see the Palazzo a Vela — the great curved roof the Minis drove over. Then we found the church steps at the Gran Madre, and the weir on the Po, and after that I was lost.

What surprised me was how little had changed. Stand in the courtyard of Palazzo Carignano, where the gold was loaded into the Minis, and it is the same courtyard. The wooden doors the two football fans swing shut at the end of the scene still have the same hinges and the same locks.

I kept going until I had found every location I could, in the city and up in the Alps, and checked each one against the film.

The tour

It seemed a waste to keep it to myself, so I started running tours. A classic Mini, a day in Turin, and someone in the passenger seat who knew every line of the film, grinning.

They were tremendous fun. We would do the city in the morning and, if people had the appetite for it, the Alpine locations another day — the pass where the coach went over the edge, the tunnel where the Miura met the bulldozer.

Life changed, as it does, and I had to stop running them.

Why the guide exists

Rather than let the research go to waste, I wrote it all down. The guide ran to four editions between 2005 and 2015 and sold as a PDF for years. TV companies used it. Magazines used it. Other tour guides used it, which I chose to take as a compliment.

I have now stopped selling it. The whole thing is on this website instead, free, with nothing to download — every location with its exact coordinates, the original maps, and the notes on what to look for the next time you watch the film.

If you are going to Turin, take it with you.