How La Morra was built and evolved over time

La Morra is a small built settlement in an enormous built landscape, and the relationship between the two is the point.

The village

La Morra is laid out along and around the top of a ridge at 513 metres, which is exactly where you put a village if the slopes are worth more than the summit. The high ground is the poorest for vines — thinner soil, more wind, later ripening — so it carries the houses, and every usable slope below carries the crop. This is the organising logic of the whole Langhe and La Morra is the clearest example of it: the settlement is dense and vertical because it is confined to the ground nobody wanted to plant.

The building material is brick, stucco and tile, the ordinary language of agricultural Piedmont, with the Torre Campanaria as the tallest thing and a second viewpoint from the top of it. The streets slope and are stepped in places.

The landscape

What UNESCO inscribed on 22 June 2014 is a construction. The amphitheatre visible from the terrace has been cleared, drained, terraced, planted, replanted and trained over centuries, with the rows set to the gradient and the sun, the woodland left only in gullies too steep to work, and about 1,734 hectares of vine across the zone. Standing on the terrace you are looking at several hundred years of accumulated decisions rather than at scenery.

The chapel

The Cappella del Barolo is a small, plain building of 1914, put up by farm workers as a storm shelter and never consecrated — vernacular agricultural construction of the humblest kind. In 1999 Sol LeWitt painted the outside and David Tremlett repainted the whole inside, in curved and geometric patterns. Nothing structural changed. It is the clearest demonstration in the region that what a building is can be altered entirely by surface, and it is now the most photographed structure in the Langhe.