The town perched in a bend of the Tanaro has undoubtedly a reputation greater than its size: just thirty thousand inhabitants, a sort of large living room where everyone knows each other, with a mission almost exclusively consecrated to good living and making people live well. others, at least for a few days. A white city as its name recalls, co-opted by the Romans from the Ligurian / Celtic root alb = water, but so similar to the Latin albus = white but also whitened, propitious, bright, serene from which the Italian word alba, understood just as the rising of the sun. But also a red city, of porphyry, tiles and bricks, so medieval and so Piedmontese. It is inevitable that Fenoglio from Alba put this vision in the eyes of Agostino - poor servant struck by misfortune -: "I imprinted in my head the bell towers and the thick houses, and then the bridge and the river, the greatest water I've ever seen… ". Alba still makes the same impression on those who come down from the Langhe towards its capital, always there with its markets, its elegant shops, cafes, pastry shops, the bells of the many churches; she already asked her ... because Alba is also white for priests and nuns, with an ancient Diocese that stretches over a thousand hills in a protective embrace (Bishop Luigi Maria Grassi was a protagonist of the Resistance) but is also red for partisans and thinkers (medal of gold, in 1944 he freed himself for 23 days, as Beppe Fenoglio always tells, a thoroughbred writer who had Pietro Chiodi among his professors at the Govone).

In recent years, the Langhe and Roero, hilly territories that extend around Alba, have been discovered or rediscovered in the light of a tradition of cordiality, good food and naturalistic beauties.

In these places there is no particular destination that offers itself as a privileged starting point or arrival point. Wandering around, in this sort of small ancient world, means traveling a few kilometers between one village and another, stopping to talk with the people, entering a restaurant for family and homemade hospitality that will remain etched in the memory. The peel of the peasant soul, sometimes rough in the eyes of the citizen, discloses, to the tourist who knows how to understand, the riches of a humanity that have been lost in the urban rush.  

​