Pinacoteca Agnelli & the Lingotto rooftop track

Completed in 1923, the Lingotto factory turned the standard idea of a car plant on its head. Instead of spreading production across a horizontal shop floor, raw materials entered at ground level and moved upward through the building as cars took shape on ramps and conveyors winding between floors, emerging complete at the top — where they were driven straight out onto a banked oval test track built directly on the roof. Le Corbusier singled the building out as a landmark of modern industrial design, precisely because it treated the factory itself as a single working machine rather than a shed full of machinery.

Fiat closed the plant in 1982 as production moved elsewhere, and the building sat at a crossroads until architect Renzo Piano's conversion in the 1990s. Piano kept the rooftop test track fully intact rather than demolishing it, and added a striking glass-walled gallery pod — nicknamed the "scrigno," or jewel case — that appears to float above the roofline on slender supports.

Inside the scrigno hangs a small but genuinely exceptional collection assembled by Fiat chairman Giovanni Agnelli and his wife Marella, running from Canaletto's 18th-century Venice through Renoir and on to Matisse and Picasso — a private taste distilled into barely two dozen works, rather than a sprawling survey collection.

The rooftop track itself, roughly a mile and a half around, had its own moment of film fame in the 1969 heist comedy "The Italian Job," whose climactic chase sequence was shot circling the oval. Today the track is landscaped with gardens and contemporary art installations rather than cars, reached by lift from inside the museum.

The museum is closed on Mondays. A visit naturally includes access to the rooftop via the internal lift, so allow time to walk at least part of the old test track and take in the views over the city, not just the gallery rooms themselves.

Because the factory has been repurposed as a much larger complex — with a shopping centre, cinema and convention spaces filling the lower floors — it's easy to combine the Pinacoteca with a broader visit to Lingotto rather than treating it as a quick stop.