Piedmont Region Guide

Piedmont is the part of northern Italy that visitors most often skip, which is much of its appeal.

• Food and wine that are taken seriously without being performed. The Langhe produce Barolo and Barbaresco and the white truffle; the Slow Food movement was founded at Bra in 1986 and still runs from there. This is working agricultural country, not a wine theme park.
• A capital city that was actually a capital. Turin was the seat of the Savoy monarchy for three centuries and Italy's first capital. The scale of its palaces, arcades and squares follows from that, and it has never been a mass-tourism city.
• Museums of real weight. The Museo Egizio in Turin holds one of the largest collections of Egyptian antiquities anywhere, assembled from the 1820s. The National Cinema Museum occupies the Mole Antonelliana, a building that was never meant to hold a museum at all.
• Three UNESCO inscriptions, all unusual. The Royal Residences of the House of Savoy, the vineyard landscapes of Langhe-Roero and Monferrato, and Ivrea, listed as a 20th-century industrial city built around Olivetti.
• Mountains on the doorstep. Monviso, the Gran Paradiso and the Via Lattea ski area are all within a couple of hours of Turin.

What it is not: a coastal region, or a warm one. Winters on the plain are cold and grey, and Piedmont has no sea at all.

Piedmont divides into three trips that share Turin as an entry point.

Turin

Two to three days. The Museo Egizio and the Mole Antonelliana are the fixed points; beyond them the city is best walked — 18 km of arcaded streets, the cafés of Piazza San Carlo, and the Baroque planning of Guarini and Juvarra. The Savoy residences ring the city: Venaria Reale and Stupinigi are both short trips out.

The Langhe, Roero and Monferrato

The reason most people come. Alba is the practical base, with Barolo, La Morra and Grinzane Cavour within a short drive and Bra a little west. The hills are steep and the roads narrow; a car is effectively required, and distances take longer than a map suggests. Autumn is truffle season and the busiest, most expensive time.

The mountains and the lakes

West of Turin the Susa and Chisone valleys climb to the Via Lattea ski area and the Colle del Sestriere. North, the Gran Paradiso national park — Italy's first, created in 1922 from a royal hunting reserve — holds ibex at close range. Lake Maggiore's western shore and the smaller, quieter Lake Orta sit in the north-east.

The rice plain

Between Vercelli and Novara lies the largest rice-growing area in Europe, flooded and mirror-flat in late spring. It is a landscape rather than a destination, and it is what makes Piedmontese risotto what it is.

Piedmont on this site is not Turin and the Alps. It is the Langhe: five small places inside one wine district, close enough to see one another from the ridgelines. The character here is agricultural, recent in its prosperity, and unusually self-aware about food.

A landscape that is legally a monument

The vineyard hills of the Langhe have been UNESCO World Heritage since 2014 — the terrain itself, not a building on it. What is protected is the pattern: rows following the contour, hazel woods on the cold north slopes, and the ciabot, the one-room stone huts built at the top of a plot to store tools and shelter from weather. La Morra sits high enough to read the whole system at once.

Villages that are their own appellation

Barolo is a village of a few hundred people whose name is on bottles worldwide, and the castle in the middle of it now holds a wine museum. Grinzane Cavour is smaller still, and its castle was home to Camillo Benso di Cavour, who was mayor here while also running the state that became Italy. He experimented with the wine on this estate.

Where Slow Food started

Bra is the least scenic of the five and the most consequential: the Slow Food movement was founded here in the 1980s and is still headquartered in the area. That is why the region talks about producers, breeds and varieties in a way that is normal here and self-conscious elsewhere.

A market town that runs on one fungus

Alba is the working centre of the district, with a medieval core of brick towers and a serious industrial employer in confectionery. For three months of the year it is organised around the white truffle, which is dug at night in the surrounding woods and sold by people who will not say where. The rest of the year it is an ordinary Piedmontese market town.

Piedmont sees far fewer visitors than Tuscany or the Veneto, so its pressures are narrow and concentrated rather than general.

The Langhe in autumn

Truffle season, roughly October to early December, concentrates most of the region's visitors into a few weeks and a few villages. Roads built for tractors carry far more traffic than they were made for, and accommodation prices roughly double. Late spring and early summer show the same landscape — green, worked, and with the cellars open — at a fraction of the pressure.

Buying truffles

The white truffle of Alba is expensive, seasonal and widely imitated. Buying at the Alba market or directly from a trifolao keeps money with the people who find them, and avoids the cheaper Asian species sold as a substitute. Truffles cannot legally be gathered without a licence.

Air quality on the plain

Turin sits in the Po basin, which has some of the poorest winter air in Europe: the surrounding mountains trap what is produced. Traffic restrictions are triggered when limits are exceeded and apply to visiting vehicles. Arriving by train removes the question.

The mountains

Gran Paradiso is a national park with real restrictions on where you may walk and camp. Ibex and chamois are approachable to a degree that is unusual, which is a consequence of a century of protection rather than tameness — keeping distance matters.

Small producers

Castelmagno, Robiola di Roccaverano, Tonda Gentile hazelnuts and the Barolo estates are mostly small operations. Buying at source returns considerably more than buying the same names in Turin or Milan.

Piedmont's seasons are sharply defined, and the region is really two destinations — hills and mountains — with opposite peaks.

• March-May. The hills green up and the vineyards are worked; the rice paddies of the plain flood in late spring and mirror the sky. Turin is comfortable and uncrowded. Alpine passes stay closed into May.
• June-August. Hot and humid on the plain, frequently above 30 °C, with afternoon storms. The mountains are the sensible place to be, and the Gran Paradiso and the lakes are at their best. Many Turin businesses close in August.
• September. Harvest across the Langhe, warm days, and the year's best balance of weather and quiet before the truffle crowds arrive.
• October-early December. Truffle season and the Alba International White Truffle Fair. The hills turn gold, the food is at its peak, and this is the most expensive and most booked period of the year.
• December-February. Cold, grey and often foggy on the plain. Good for Turin's museums, its cafés and its chocolate, and the season for the Via Lattea and Bardonecchia. The Ivrea Carnival's Battle of the Oranges falls in February.

Year-round relative cost index vs region average