Nizza Monferrato

Nizza Monferrato sits in the south of the Asti province, thirty kilometers from Asti city. It was founded in 1225 by inhabitants displaced from castles in the Alessandria area, joined the Marquisate of Monferrato in 1264, and grew through the 19th century as the commercial center of the Barbera-growing hills around it. The medieval grid from that 1225 founding still holds the centro storico together, with Renaissance and 18th-century palazzi lining Via Pio Corsi and Via Carlo Alberto, while the vineyards that made the town's fortune spread out beyond it at 200 to 400 meters.

That agricultural hinterland and the market town at its center still explain each other: the Foro Boario, the old cattle market on Piazza Garibaldi, is the physical record of a town that existed to move what the hills produced, and it still does that job as a multipurpose hall for the antiques market and for the November weekend known as Nizza è Bagna Cauda. At that gathering, long communal tables fill with the Cardo Gobbo, a hunchbacked cardoon grown only here and protected by a Slow Food presidium, alongside Barbera raised to DOCG status in 2014. A town built to trade a hillside's produce has ended up defined by two of that produce's most particular forms.

From Genoa (GOA), about 1h 23m by car.

Turin (TRN) is about 1h 35m away.

By car from the centre of Milan 1h 43m.

There is a railway station in the comune, so you can arrive without a car.

Coming from Turin, Genoa or Milan?

Coming by train into Torino Porta Susa? Nizza Monferrato is about 1h 17m away by road.

Every town within reach of Genoa airport.