Castle of Grinzane Cavour (Italy)

The name of the small village pays tribute to the Risorgimento statesman who was mayor of Grinzane for seventeen years. Appointed in May 1832 to twenty-two years, he held this office until February 1849. At his death the castle passed to his favorite nephew Giuseppina who married Count Carlo Alfieri di Sostegno. The last descendant of this family, Marquise Adele Alfieri, left the castle to the town of Alba, of which Grinzane was a hamlet.

The municipality is divided into two centers, Gallo and Grinzane Cavour. Gallo hosts many craft and industrial activities (including the Sebaste Nougat and the World), while the historic center of the village consists of Grinzane Cavour, with its few houses, tight around the austere silhouette of the Castle.

Built in the first half of the 13th century, the castle underwent some architectural changes. Today's appearance is the result of restorations begun in 1961, on the occasion of the first 100 years of the Italian state. The imposing brick building has a trapezoidal plan, with four bodies irregularly arranged around the small main courtyard. In the 16th century it was enlarged with the addition of the two picturesque cylindrical turrets; of the same period, in the Sala delle Maschere, the coffered ceiling with 157 tablets painted on the occasion of the marriage of Pietrino Falletti, bearing depictions of heraldic coats of arms, animals, allegories and portraits.

Today it is home to the Piemontese Cavour Regional Enoteca, a restaurant and an ethnographic museum on rural culture. The latter houses materials relating to different themes: Cavourian memorabilia, Alba Roman wines, settings in the Alba area in the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries, wine glasses, old Mondovì grape dishes, artefacts related to albese food and wine, shops of the blacksmith and the cooper, an eighteenth-century distillery, courtyard peasants, weights and measures, teaching of truffles.

Since 1983 the castle is also home to the Grinzane Cavour Literary Prize for Italian and foreign fiction, established by the Turin International Publishing Company to promote the dissemination of literature among young people. Also worthy of note is the old parish church, built by Count Camillo di Cavour, dedicated to the Madonna del Carmine.