Europe Day 11: Italy, and the Italians Therein

Friday morning we had a presentation from several local retired Italians who had volunteered at the Torino Winter Olympic Games in 2006. They shared with us about their experiences as volunteers, and the effects that the Games had on the city of Torino.


It was interesting to hear about their experiences, but not the most informative presentation of the trip.
Following that presentation, we were joined by Stephano, an acquaintance of our professors, who had arranged much of our Torino schedule, for the walk to lunch, through what had been the Olympic village for the Torino games. We went across a massive bridge:


to a former Fiat manufacturing plant, which now houses one of the largest shopping malls I've ever seen.





Had some decent lasagna for lunch at a very large grocery store/cafe actually just outside the mall, called "Eataly."
After lunch, we walked again through the former athlete's village. Torino presents a sharp contrast to Munich regarding the legacy of the Games. Where Munich had a beautiful park left from the Games in 1972, and had their athlete's village converted into housing, Torino's athlete's village looked like a ghost town. It was creepy how empty and deserted the area was. It's hard to believe that the Olympic Games there were just 5 years ago.








Our next stop for the afternoon was a company called deltatre, which none of us had heard of before. Even the professors weren't really sure what to expect, as the company had been recommended to us as a stop by our contact at NBC Sports in New York.


It turned out that deltatre is a sports technology company, involved in internet sports content, television broadcast graphics and production, and other sports technology. For instance, they were responsible for the FIFA World Cup website, and they will be responsible for the London 2012 website during the Games.





This was probably my favorite presentation thus far, as they covered some of the technologies and applications of technologies that I have been studying as a computer science major. There were definitely parts of the presentation that only Brad, myself, and Aaron, the other computer science major on the trip understood, but I think everyone was impressed with what this company does. They showed us some of the software that they have developed that does things like track where exactly each player and the ball is constantly during a soccer match, and some of their custom interactive online video players. Finally, they took us downstairs to their operations center, where they handle live streaming and packaging of sports events.


My kind of place:


Also (and this was way more exciting than it probably should have been...), they had a Microsoft Surface table in the lobby of the building...first time I'd seen one in person. (Look it up)


I went back with a different group of people to the same restaurant as the night before, but made far better choices in ordering...pizza and split a bottle of wine...much better meal!


Ended the night with a ridiculously long hunt for the first gelato I've had in my life. Interesting fact about Torino: Everything in the city closes at 7, except for sit-down restaurants, which don't open until 6:30 or 7...It took us about an hour to find a gelato shop that was open...but we finally succeeded!