Archive · Chronicle · Memory Anteprima Turin, Italia
TORINOMIA
en

Langhe

A hilly region of southern Piedmont between the Tanaro and the Bormida, home to Barolo, white truffles and hazelnuts, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014.

The Langhe are a hilly region of southern Piedmont: to the north and west they are closed off by the valley of the Tanaro, to the east by that of the Bormida, and to the south by the watershed separating Piedmont from Liguria.[1] They are the land of Barolo and Barbaresco, of white truffles and hazelnuts, but also the landscape of two writers who marked twentieth-century Italian literature, Beppe Fenoglio and Cesare Pavese. Since 22 June 2014, together with the Roero and the Monferrato, their vineyards have been a UNESCO World Heritage site.[2][3]

Geography

The area is a bundle of calcareous-marl rock ridges, cut by valleys running parallel to the Belbo valley from south to north. The Langhe plateau sits on average around 650 metres, nearly double the 350 metres of the neighbouring Monferrato. The clays, sandstones and blue marls that make up the hills crumble easily, and many slopes are marked by badlands; villages mostly sit atop the ridges, among the remains of medieval castles and towers.[1]

The name of these hills has also entered the vocabulary of geologists: the Langhian is the lower stage of the Middle Miocene, named precisely after the Langhe. The area also gives its name to a local sheep breed, the Langhe sheep, a variety of the Bergamasca.[1]

Hardship and war

Before becoming one of the richest farming areas in Italy, the Langhe were for a long time a land of hard, poorly paid labour. This is the world told by Fenoglio, born in Alba in 1922, in La malora (1954), a short novel about the harshness of labour relations in the Langhe countryside between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1947 Fenoglio worked for Figli di Antonio Marenco, a wine-exporting firm in Alba, where he rose to managerial roles and found time to write.[4]

Between 1943 and 1945 the hills were one of the main theatres of the Piedmontese Resistance: Fenoglio fought with the partisans in the Langhe, took part in December 1943 in the assault on the carabinieri barracks in Alba and in February 1945 in the clash at Valdivilla.[4] On 10 October 1944 partisan units entered Alba, the first city in northern Italy to free itself; they lost it on 2 November.[5] That episode became a story and then a title, I ventitré giorni della città di Alba ("The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba"), which opens like this:

"Two thousand men took Alba on 10 October and two hundred lost it on 2 November of the year 1944"

Beppe Fenoglio, I ventitré giorni della città di Alba

For those events the city received the gold medal for military valour.[5]

A few kilometres further east, in the Belbo valley, Pavese was born in 1908 at Santo Stefano Belbo, on a farmstead where the family, who lived in Turin, spent their summers. It was to those same hills that the writer returned in his last novel, La luna e i falò ("The Moon and the Bonfires"), written between September and November 1949 and published in 1950: the story of a man who returns to his village after years away.[6]

White truffle and hazelnuts

The Langhe's gastronomic fame around the world owes much to an Alba hotelier, Giacomo Morra. In 1928 he took over the Hotel Savona, then in decline, and at the end of the 1920s invented the truffle fair, banking on the evocative power of the tuber. An advertisement from the late 1950s boasted more than a hundred thousand boxes of truffles shipped every year from Alba; in 1951 Morra sent one weighing 2,520 grams to US President Harry Truman, in 1954 another to Marilyn Monroe, and in the autumn of 1960 he hosted Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville at the hotel.[7] Prices follow the season: before Christmas 2022, in a season of scarce truffles, pieces over 50 grams went for more than €6,000 a kilogram. The competition among truffle hunters also has a dark side: the Langhe and the Roero are among the areas where truffle dogs have been poisoned with metaldehyde baits.[8]

From the hazelnuts of the hills around Alba, on the other hand, an industry was born. In the postwar years, when cocoa was expensive and scarce, brothers Pietro and Giovanni Ferrero worked out recipes in the family pastry shop that used less cocoa and more hazelnuts.[9] Ferrero, founded by Pietro in 1946, passed in 1949 to his son Michele, under whose leadership Nutella was created in 1964.[10] In 2017 Alba was recognised by UNESCO as a Creative City of Gastronomy.[9]

Wine and the UNESCO recognition

On the marls of the Langhe grow the vines of Piedmont's great red wines, starting with Nebbiolo and Barbera.[1] The Consorzio di tutela Barolo Barbaresco Alba Langhe e Dogliani, based in Alba with more than 550 member producers, protects nine denominations: the DOCG wines Barolo, Barbaresco, Dogliani and Diano d'Alba, and the DOC wines Nebbiolo d'Alba, Barbera d'Alba, Dolcetto d'Alba, Verduno and Langhe.[11] In 2024 the consortium approved a requirement to bottle Barolo and Barbaresco within the grape-growing zone, since the rules written sixty years earlier made no provision for it; rejected, on the other hand, was the proposal to extend the vineyards to north-facing slopes, put forward in view of climate change and feared by some producers for its effect on prices.[12]

The UNESCO bid began in 2003 on the initiative of the Piedmont Region; the dossier was submitted in 2011 and, after evaluation by ICOMOS inspectors in 2013, resubmitted with changes.[3] The first attempt had been rejected. Years later Roberto Cerrato, who heads the association that manages the site, told the story this way to the World Heritage Committee in Kraków:

"I told of difficult but very exciting months, in which we agreed to start again after the rejection of the first attempt"

Roberto Cerrato, July 2017

The text is reported by the Gazzetta d'Alba.[13] Inscription came in Doha on 22 June 2014: the Vineyard Landscapes of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato became the fiftieth Italian site on the list and the first cultural wine landscape in Italy.[3] The site covers 10,785 hectares, with a buffer zone of more than 76,000, and is recognised under criteria (iii) and (v): evidence of a living wine culture and the centuries-old interaction between people and environment; vine pollen found in the area dates back to the 5th century BC.[2] Of the six components, three are in the Langhe: the Langa del Barolo, the Barbaresco hills and the castle of Grinzane linked to the name of Cavour.[2][3] That day the mayor of Alba, Maurizio Marello, declared: "The Langhe are a unique and exceptional heritage of humanity," while the president of the Region, Sergio Chiamparino, spoke of "a starting point, not a finishing line."[14] According to figures released at the time, the area had about 2,000 wine businesses, 10,000 hectares under vine and 66 million bottles a year, 60 per cent of them destined for export.[14]

The Langhe today

Success has brought wealth, and tensions too. In July 2024 the police of Cuneo, in an investigation coordinated by the Asti public prosecutor's office, documented assaults on foreign farmworkers in the vineyards between Farigliano, Neive, Castiglione Tinella and Monforte d'Alba: three people were placed under precautionary measures (two under house arrest, one banned from carrying on the activity) on charges of illicit intermediation, that is, labour racketeering (caporalato), and labour exploitation, and the chief prosecutor of Asti announced plans to extend the investigation to wine businesses. According to investigators, the workers stayed among the rows for more than ten hours a day, for wages that almost never exceeded five euros an hour.[15]

The link with Turin also runs through wine showcases: since 2022 the Grandi Langhe event, the year's first opportunity to taste the new vintages of Barolo and Barbaresco, has moved from Alba to the OGR. For the 2025 edition the consortium reported 300 wineries and 5,000 participants from 30 countries.[16]

Pages linking here

Related articles: Alba, Asti, Barolo (wine), Ferrero, Monferrato, Nutella

Sources

  1. Treccani
  2. UNESCO World Heritage Centre
  3. Associazione per il Patrimonio dei Paesaggi Vitivinicoli di Langhe-Roero e Monferrato
  4. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
  5. Gazzetta d'Alba — 11 October 2024
  6. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
  7. Gazzetta d'Alba — 1 October 2013
  8. Il Post — 24 January 2023
  9. Ferrero
  10. Il Post — 14 February 2015
  11. Consorzio di tutela Barolo Barbaresco Alba Langhe e Dogliani
  12. Il Post — 20 June 2024
  13. Gazzetta d'Alba — 5 July 2017
  14. Gazzetta d'Alba — 26 June 2014
  15. Il Post — 11 July 2024
  16. Consorzio di tutela Barolo Barbaresco Alba Langhe e Dogliani

Report a mistake.