Turin, Italy - Normally, 1 a.m. is not the optimal time to go out for a night on the town. But last Saturday, it was just about perfect. To celebrate the Olympics, Turin declared that evening “Notte Bianca” - a white night - and invited everyone to a party that didn’t end until dawn. The idea has been rattling around Europe for a number of years and seems to have started in Paris, which holds a “nuit blanche” every October. On such nights, the entire town stays open until dawn on Sunday. Museums open their doors and waive admission fees. Churches, parks, tourist sites and recreation areas are also open, as are shops, cafes and restaurants. Turin tried it a few years ago, the first Italian city to do so, but, the locals say, it didn’t go over that well. Rome gave it a shot, and it was a big success there. Other cities around Europe have also done it. With the Olympics in town, Turin decided to do it again, and this time it was a huge success. At 1 a.m., our car couldn’t get close to downtown because of the great masses of people who had descended on the heart of the city - il centro - to wander and celebrate. Turin is a sprawling city, and most of it is just a gray and beige expanse of apartments and businesses. But it has been around for 2,000 years, when the Roman emperor Augustus built a military fortress on the site. And any time a city has that many years of history, it’s bound to have something going for it. In Turin, it’s the city center, which goes back to the 15th and 16th centuries. The main streets are broad and there’s a great deal of baroque architecture with huge piazzas seemingly everywhere. For the Olympics, the town has strung lights over many of the streets, with each street reflecting a theme. One forms an archway of neon male and female forms. Another depicts the solar system. Yet another recreates the signs of the Zodiac in a sea of tiny stars. The problem with Turin as an Olympic city is that all of this is relatively far away from the venues. The skiing, bobsledding, snowboarding, luge and skeleton events are all in the mountains, a couple of hours outside of town. The skating and hockey are in various buildings in town, but they are scattered and several miles from the center. When you cover the games, you seldom get done before midnight, which is when the buses and trams stop running. So it’s hard to get downtown to see anything. Notte Bianca took care of that, and it seems everyone else in Turin had the same idea. There were so many people, it was a battle to get into a restaurant, bar or café, either to get something to eat or drink or to use the facilities - Turin’s planning for an onslaught of several hundred thousand visitors did not include public restroom facilities. By about 2 or 2:30 a.m., we had made our way down to the Po River, whose west bank is lined with trendy clubs carved into the bedrock. Here, movement was nearly impossible, but the reward was the lights of the city and the clubs reflected in the placid waters of the river, which flows so slowly as to be almost a lake. By 3:30, we decided to head home, figuring the best way to do that was to work our way back to the main train station - Porta Nuova - where we could get a cab. In Turin, you don’t flag down cabs; you have to call them first. So we stopped at a place called the Huntsman, a British pub with a smoking room. I had been there once before and ended up trading toasts with a German television crew. This night, we had a drink with an engaging gentleman who turned out to be Jim Scherr, the CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee. That’s the magic of the Games. You never know who you will meet and what you will learn. On the way home, I found myself thinking that Notte Bianca was a great idea and wondering what it would be like if New York tried it. I could see it being a disaster. I could see it being great good fun.