Turin, Italy - Ah, Italy. The wine. The food. The piazzas lined with gorgeous buildings. I’m not getting any of it. Not that I’m complaining. I’m here getting paid by MSNBC.com to cover the Winter Olympics, and if that doesn’t leave a lot of time for night clubs and fine dining, so what? Turin - Torino to NBC Sports and the Italians - is a sprawling industrial city that has been through some rough times ever since Fiat, which called the city home, downsized its business and moved to the suburbs. It sought the Olympics in an effort to get the world to rediscover its charms. Unfortunately, the city is so big and the Olympics so spread out, it’s hard to get a real sense that they are even going on. By their nature, the Winter Games translate best to mountain villages and small towns - Innsbruck, Lake Placid, Albertville, Lillehammer. Put them in a big city, and they tend to get lost. And Turin itself is relatively low-lying, occupying the flatlands of the Po Valley in the Piedmont Plateau. The mountains that are home to the skiing events are 60 miles away. To go there to cover an event, you have to get up before dawn and figure on getting home long past dark. “Home” is a 100-year-old Italian Army mental hospital that’s been converted into something like 1,000 individual rooms. The rooms are small but clean and comfortable, and have the advantage of having very thick walls - the better to isolate the screaming inmates. Churches should be so quiet. As near as I can tell, the rooms are occupied entirely by NBC employees. But even with 1,000 beds, the network of the Olympics needs several additional housing units to accommodate the more than 3,000 people - from Brian Williams to a lowly writer for the Internet - it takes to produce the Olympics. The International Broadcast Center and various subcenters at all 17 venues are the workplaces of 2,700 of those employees. Another 350 affiliated with NBC News and MSNBC - including the Today Show and the Nightly News - work in a separate facility. NBC installs kitchens and hires caterers at every facility. Nearly every employee is issued a cell phone. Every employee gets a parka and backpack. Fleets of cars and buses with locally hired drivers get people where they have to be. It is an astonishingly complex operation, and all you can think of when you look at is that the government should be so thorough and efficient. So far, I’ve seen Chad Hedrick win a gold medal and Bode Miller lose one. A local boy, Danny Kass, made good on the halfpipe, and the snowboarders who competed just a few weeks ago at Mountain Creek have won four medals total. There’s a lot more to come. I’ll fill you in next week.