Bra Geography, Climate & Nature

Bra sits at the hinge between hill and plain, and that position explains both the town and its history.

The site

The town is at 285 metres across a municipality of 59.53 km², on the western margin of the hill country. East and south of here the land rises into the Langhe — the hills south and east of the Tanaro, across the provinces of Cuneo and Asti, where the Nebbiolo grows. West and north it flattens into the Piedmont plain towards Turin. Bra is on the edge, which is why it is a market town of nearly thirty thousand rather than a ridge village of two thousand: there is room here, and roads cross.

Pollenzo

Pollenzo is a frazione within Bra's boundaries, on the Tanaro, and it is where the Slow Food headquarters and the University of Gastronomic Sciences are. The fact that the town's two internationally significant institutions are in an outlying hamlet rather than the centre is worth knowing before you plan a day.

What is nearby

Alba is twenty minutes east, and beyond it the Barolo villages — Barolo, La Morra, Grinzane Cavour — at half an hour. The vineyard landscape inscribed by UNESCO on 22 June 2014 begins just east of Bra; the town itself is not one of the three inscribed Langhe areas, which are the Langa of Barolo, Grinzane Cavour Castle and the Hills of Barbaresco.

What it means for a visitor

Bra is flat and walkable, which after the hill villages is a real advantage, and it has a railway station — making it one of the few places in this area you can reach and leave without a car. For the hills themselves you still need one.

Bra is at 285 metres on the margin of the Piedmont plain, and the climate is the plain's rather than the hills'.

What each season does

• Winter is cold and grey, and the distinguishing feature is fog. Flat ground holds it: where La Morra at 513 metres often sits above the cloud in sun, Bra sits inside it. This is the classic Po-basin winter and it can last for days.
• Spring is changeable and wet early, then good from May. The arcaded streets are at their best in late spring.
• Summer is hot and humid without the relief of altitude — this is the plain, and it feels like it in August. Many residents leave.
• Autumn is the best season for food and the start of the fog. Harvest in the hills nearby, truffle season in Alba from 10 October, and the beginning of the heavy Piedmontese cooking that the weather justifies.

Practical consequences

Two. The fog affects driving more here than in the hills, because on the plain it is uniform and extensive rather than patchy — if you are driving east into the Langhe on a December morning, expect to be in it for the whole journey. And Bra has less seasonal variation in what is open than the villages do: it is a town of nearly thirty thousand, so the restaurants and shops run year-round, which is one of the arguments for basing here in winter.

Bra's 59.53 km² cover two quite different kinds of ground, because the town sits where the hills meet the plain.

• The Tanaro corridor is the ecologically significant feature. The river runs through the commune at Pollenzo, and its riparian strip — white willow, black poplar, alder — is the main continuous habitat here and functions as a movement corridor between the hills and the plain. River corridors matter disproportionately in intensively farmed country because they are the only continuous linear habitat left, and the Tanaro is this area's.
• The Piedmont plain west and north is arable and horticultural: field crops, orchards and increasingly maize and cereals, with hedgerow and field-margin habitat where it survives. This is productive, heavily managed ground with low structural diversity.
• The hill margin east and south is the transition into the Langhe — vineyard on the better slopes, hazelnut groves, and fragments of oak and hornbeam woodland in the gullies too steep to plant. These fragments are the habitat reservoir, as they are across the whole of these hills.
• The town itself and the hill under the Zizzola carry the usual urban-edge community: swifts and martins on the buildings, bats in the roofs, and the scrub and rough grass of ground that is neither farmed nor built.

The honest framing

Bra is an agricultural and industrial town on the edge of a plain, and it is not a nature destination. Its interest on this subject is a different one and genuinely unusual: this is the headquarters of a movement that has spent since 1986 arguing that food production and biodiversity are the same question, and that argument is made here with more institutional weight — a university, a global network of 244 Italian groups and chapters in 160 countries — than in any other town of under thirty thousand people.

This is farmed plain and hill-margin country, and the wildlife is correspondingly the wildlife of edges, river and field.

The river

The Tanaro through Pollenzo is the best of it. Riparian woodland and the river itself hold grey heron, little egret, kingfisher and mallard, with cormorant working the water in winter. Walking the river rather than the fields is the productive choice here, and it is flat — which, after La Morra, is worth saying.

Mammals

Roe deer and wild boar use the hill margin and the river woodland, and boar are the animal most likely to be encountered on the hill side of the commune at dusk; they are an agricultural problem across these hills and are hunted accordingly. Red fox, stone marten and European hare are the regular mammals of the farmed ground. Coypu, introduced, is present along the watercourses.

Birds of the farmed land

Common buzzard and kestrel hunt the open fields and are the raptors you will see. Barn swallow and house martin nest on farm buildings and in the town; hoopoe arrives in spring on the hill margin. Little owl uses the farm outbuildings and is often visible at dusk on a post or a wire — one of the easier owls to see anywhere in Piedmont.

Where to look

The Tanaro at Pollenzo, early, for herons and kingfisher. The hill margin east of the town at first light, for deer, boar sign and the spring migrants. Not the open arable, which is productive for crops and little else.