Alba

Every autumn, since 1928, Alba has celebrated the fair of its king: the white truffle, which here has its market, its world auction and a liturgy of its own. The fair began as a side event to the grape harvest festival, on the intuition of a hotelier, Giacomo Morra; and ever since, each year, the organisers give the season's finest truffle to a famous person. The list of guests says more than any description: Joe DiMaggio, Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, king Farouk of Egypt, Ugo Tognazzi, Alain Delon. They call it the city of a hundred towers, and the towers are still there: they were built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but nearly all were lowered to roof level or swallowed into the houses, and now you have to know how to see them.

A Roman emperor was born at Alba, Publius Helvius Pertinax. And in the autumn of nineteen forty-four Alba was the first partisan republic in Italy, and for that it carries the gold medal for military valour: it lasted twenty-three days, and the man who told its story was a native of Alba who wrote for a living, Beppe Fenoglio, who titled that book with the number of the days. Fenoglio had studied at the town's classical liceo, the same one that produced Dante Giacosa, who at Fiat designed the cars of the Italians, and the surgeon Achille Mario Dogliotti. At the Caffè Calissano, under the arcades of the cathedral square, he and Cesare Pavese used to go, along with the champions of pallapugno. In 1946, in this city that is an industrial capital dressed as a provincial town, Ferrero was born — and on certain mornings the smell of cocoa confirms it. All around, Barolo and Barbaresco lie half an hour away over the hills.