How Barolo was built and evolved over time

Barolo is a small village with one significant building and an enormous piece of engineered landscape around it.

The castle

The Castello Comunale Falletti di Barolo stands on the rise above the square, a medieval structure in the hands of the Falletti family for long enough that it carries their name permanently. The sources available here describe it as medieval without giving a construction date, so this page does not supply one — and in any case the building that exists now is the product of repeated alteration, as such a castle always is: defensive work first, then a noble residence, and now a municipal building housing a museum and a wine shop. It is at Piazza Falletti 1.

Its most recent transformation is the interesting one. The WiMu inside it was designed by François Confino as an interactive route rather than a conventional display, which means the castle's rooms were reworked as an experience rather than filled with cases. Adapting a medieval castle this way is a deliberate choice about what a small village can do with its one monument.

The village

Barolo itself is brick, stucco and tile — the ordinary building language of an agricultural Piedmont village, because that is what it is. The Tanaro basin has clay and no good building stone, so brick is the regional material and architectural effect is got through proportion and patterned brickwork rather than carving.

The landscape, which is the real construction

The thing UNESCO inscribed on 22 June 2014 is built, not natural. These slopes have been cleared, terraced, drained, planted, replanted and trained over centuries, with the rows running in the direction the gradient and the sun dictate, the villages placed on the ridges where the land is poorest, and the woodland left only in the gullies too steep to work. Around 1,734 hectares of this across the zone represents an accumulation of decisions rather than a design, which is precisely what a cultural landscape is.