By William Schomberg
TURIN, Dec 27 (Reuters) - Turin, a city that for many Italians conjures up images of vast Fiat car plants, smog and the country's distant royal past, is about to get a futuristic style makeover.
The Winter Olympics will turn the eyes of the world on the city in 2006 and planners hope the Games will help spark the kind of urban rejuvenation that helped transform Barcelona into one of Europe's most cosmopolitan centres.
Diggers are already ripping up streets and demolition notices are going up at the huge former factories that were once the heart of Fiat's century-old industrial empire.
In their place will rise housing complexes, railway stations, parks and other projects designed by architects selected from around the world.
"Once we were the capital of Italy, then we were the capital of its industry. Now we are entering our third big phase," said Paolo Verri, director of the Torino Internazionale project which is in charge of Turin's overhaul.
Distanced from the rest of Italy in a corner of the country's northwest, hemmed in by the mountains of the Alps and largely ignored by tourists, Turin has a reputation as a conservative, boring kind of place.
It was the capital of the newly united Italy for a few years in the 1860s. Then it was a boom town for much of the 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of workers from Italy's poor south flocked to its car factories and other industries.
But those days are long gone.
Fiat is still the largest private sector employer in all of Italy but is immersed in a deep crisis and this month announced thousands of redundancies, roughly 1,000 of them in the Turin area.
That will further cut the number of people in the city who work for Fiat which has fallen to about 40,000 from more than 100,000 in the 1970s.
NO UMBILICAL CORD WITH FIAT - MAYOR
With its core industry in decline, Turin is about 15 years behind other big European cities in terms of modernisation, Mayor Sergio Chiamparino concedes. Only now is the city's first metro line being built.
The roughly eight billion euros (dollars) being pumped into infrastructure in the area should help change that.
"Turin has the resources to survive even if Fiat were to get out of car-making altogether," Chiamparino said. "There is no longer an umbilical cord with Fiat."
Many of the new buildings planned between now and 2010 will go up along a "spine" covering a railway line that currently cuts Turin in two.
The 19th century railway was once busy with trains serving assembly lines, steelworks and other heavy industry.
Many of those sites have been reduced to rubble ahead of rebuilding while on others still stand cathedral-sized factories, now mere monuments to Turin's industrial glory days.
Fiat workers have been demonstrating on the streets and blocking the main roads around the city. But most people in Turin seem have few regrets about the change from a one-company town towards a more service-based economy.
The transformation has been underway since a crisis at Fiat in the 1980s prompted the city to rethink its dependence on the group. Officials stress that their plans to transform Turin date from well before the city won the Winter Olympics bid in 1999.
Giving a sense of style already are Turin's industrial design houses like Pininfarina and Italdesign Giugiaro. They rose to world fame by designing Fiat's Ferrari and Alfa Romeo sports cars before diversifying to shape everything from trains to elegantly turned pasta shells.
A decision by the U.S. mobile phone-maker Motorola to build a regional research centre in the city has been hailed as a success in Turin's push to turn itself into a centre for wireless communications technology.
The arrival of hordes of spectators to the Winter Games in 2006 could kick-start the region's so far low-key tourism industry.
The skiing events will take place in mountain resorts an hour's drive from the city. But the ice-skating and ice hockey will be contested in an Olympic District, close to Fiat's historic Lingotto factory, now a conference centre and hotel.
The organisers -- who have been advised by the planners of Barcelona's 1992 summer Olympics -- say Turin, with its population of about one million, will be the biggest city to host the winter Games.
FROM CARS TO FOOD AND ART
Aldo Cingolani, director general of Giugiaro Design, said it was a sign of the times that Turin had dropped its car shows but was getting lots of attention for its annual culinary fair.
As well as food -- Turin's Piedmont region is famous for its truffles, meat dishes and chocolate -- an art scene is springing up as former factory space is taken over by galleries.
No longer does Turin rise and sleep to the rhythm of the car factory shifts, locals say proudly.
"Now when I go to Rome or Milan I don't feel that kind of psychological submission with regards to Turin," said Walter Barberis, a senior executive at Einaudi Editore, one of Italy's biggest publishing houses. "Today, I would even say that relationship has been inverted."
A few blocks from his office, cranes swing over the railway line that is being lowered underground, creating the space to build the backbone of Turin's new development.
Architectural sketches promise the kind of 21st century creations that have embellished cities worldwide -- constructions of slender metal and glass, infused with natural light and full of curves.
But not everyone is raving about the shape of Turin to come.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's all too conventional," said design house boss Cingolani. "They've not come up with anything that says: 'This is Turin' like the Guggenheim which stands out for Bilbao or (Norman) Foster's parliament building in Berlin."
Despite differences over style, there is a buzz in Turin, a feeling that things are on the move after all the decades of slow decline watching the car industry stumble.
"Turin has never been such a good place to live," said publisher Barberis. "The Fiat crisis is a tremendous opportunity for Turin and if we don't take it, it will be unforgivable."