Alba attractions

Alba's own sights are concentrated in ten minutes of walking, and the rest of what brings people here is in the hills around it.

In town: the brick cathedral of San Lorenzo, 12th-century Romanesque with its original portals and crypt and a carved choir of 1512; the surviving medieval tower-houses, remnants of the forest of towers that gave Alba its nickname in the 14th and 15th centuries, now standing over the shopfronts of Via Vittorio Emanuele; and the Roman and medieval archaeology under the centre, visited on guided tours.

Within twenty minutes, and the real reason to be here: three of the areas inscribed by UNESCO on 22 June 2014 as part of the Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont. The Langa of Barolo to the south-west, with Barolo's castle and wine museum and La Morra's terrace over the whole amphitheatre. The castle of Grinzane Cavour, inscribed in its own right. And the Hills of Barbaresco on the other side of town.

Nothing here is a queue. What the Langhe ask is a car, or a driver, and the willingness to drive slowly on ridge roads.