Italy Guide
Piemonte and Valle d'Aosta
Alba
Whether or not you want to taste wine, ALBA is worth the visit for its alluring mix of red-brick medieval towers, Baroque and Renaissance palaces and cobbled streets lined with gastronomic shops. And if you come in October, you'll catch the town's hilarious annual donkey race – a skit on nearby Asti's prestigious Palio.
The town's only sight as such is its late-Gothic Duomo, standing confectionery pink on the central Piazza Risorgimento. But Alba is primarily a place to stroll and eat. Leading up to the centre from Piazza Savona, the main drag of Via Vittorio Emanuele is a fine, bustling street, with the most tempting of Alba's local produce on display – wines, truffles, cheeses, weird and wonderful mushroom varieties, and the wickedly sticky nocciola, a nutty, chocolatey cake. Via Cavour is a pleasant medieval street with plenty of wine shops, behind which the donkey race and displays of medieval pageantry attract the crowds during the festival at the beginning of October. There's also an annual truffle festival later in the month, when you could blow your whole budget on a knobbly truffle or a meal in one of the many swanky restaurants. At the end of April/beginning of May, the Vinum festival gives you the chance to taste five hundred local wines.