How Alba was built and evolved over time

Alba is a brick town on a Roman plan, and all three of its building periods are visible from the same street.

Roman

Alba Pompeia was recognised as a town while the consul Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo was building a road from Acqui to Turin, and the Roman layout still governs the centre: the main axes of the old town are the Roman ones. The archaeology is below the modern surface rather than beside it — foundations, pavements and structures under the streets and buildings, visited on guided tours rather than standing in a park. This is the normal condition for a town that never stopped being occupied.

Romanesque

The cathedral of San Lorenzo is a 12th-century Romanesque building in red brick, probably raised over a Roman temple — reuse of site rather than of stone. What survives from the original fabric is its three portals and its crypt; the rest has been altered over the centuries, and the carved wooden choir of 1512 by Bernardino Fossati is the finest single thing inside. Brick rather than stone is the regional idiom: the Tanaro valley has clay and no good building stone, so Piedmont's Gothic and Romanesque are brick architecture, with the detail achieved in moulded and patterned brickwork rather than carving.

The towers

In the 14th and 15th centuries Alba's families built tower-houses in such numbers that the town was called the city of a hundred towers. A tower was a fortified residence and a status claim at once, and a skyline of them means a commune whose leading families were armed and competitive. Several survive, truncated and absorbed into later buildings, which is why the right way to see them is to walk the shopping street and look above the shopfronts.

The 19th and 20th centuries

Alba's later architecture is the architecture of a prosperous market town: Liberty-period facades, arcaded streets, and the civic buildings of a place that was getting richer on agriculture. The industrial layer is Ferrero, on the edge of town, which is a factory rather than a monument but is as much a part of how Alba was built as the cathedral.