Alba is a historic city known for its numerous cultural and culinary events. In the center, Renaissance and Baroque buildings and medieval residential towers have been preserved.
The most famous white truffles take their name from the city. This is the most valuable variety, and those harvested near Alba are valued for their unique taste. The vicinity of the city is overgrown with vineyards from which the famous Barolo, Dolcetto, Barbera and Barbaresco wines are produced. The city is also the seat of one of the most famous confectionery companies, the Ferrero company.
The city center is centered around three squares, Piazza Savona, Risorgimento and Garibaldi. They are surrounded by town houses and palaces from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Residential towers from the Middle Ages are valuable monuments. To this day, only a dozen of them survive, but in the past there were more than a hundred, giving rise to the nickname Alba, "the city of a hundred towers".
Among the buildings, you can also see valuable churches. The oldest of them is the cathedral of St. Lawrence from the 12th century, probably erected on the ruins of a Roman temple. It owes its present appearance to the reconstruction from the 19th century, but many Romanesque elements have also been preserved here. Alba's other famous churches include the Gothic Church of St. Dominic and the baroque St. John the Baptist.
