Alba historical timeline

Alba has been the market for these hills for two thousand years, and the two episodes it is proudest of are two millennia apart.

1. 1st century BC — Alba Pompeia is officially recognised as a town by the Roman consul Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, while he is building a road from Acqui to Turin. The road is the reason: Alba exists because it is where routes cross.
2. 12th century — the cathedral of San Lorenzo is built in Romanesque brick, probably on the site of a Roman temple. Its three portals and its crypt survive from that building.
3. 14th–15th centuries — the commune at its most vertical. Alba's families build so many tower-houses that it becomes known as the city of a hundred towers. Several still stand above the shopping streets.
4. 1512 — Bernardino Fossati carves the wooden choir in the cathedral.
5. 1966 and 1980 — Barolo, made in the hills immediately south-west, becomes a DOC and then a DOCG. The modern economy of the Langhe dates from this period, not from antiquity: these were poor hills within living memory.
6. 10 October 1944 — partisans liberate Alba and declare a republic.
7. 2 November 1944 — the Fascist Republic of Salò retakes the town. The Republic of Alba had lasted twenty-three days, and it became the central episode in the literature of the Italian Resistance — not least because one of the fighters was Beppe Fenoglio (1922–1963), who wrote about it afterwards.
8. 22 June 2014 — UNESCO inscribes the Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato. Three of the Langhe components are within half an hour of Alba: the Langa of Barolo, the Hills of Barbaresco and the castle of Grinzane Cavour.