AltraVia — a walk through Monferrato, Roero, Langhe and Liguria

From Turin to Savona in nine stages, 206 kilometres to be covered on foot or by bicycle: AltraVia is a linear itinerary crossing four distinct territories — Monferrato, Roero, Langhe and the Ligurian mountains — each with its own grammar of landscapes, soils and produce. The route is not designed for speed, and this imposed slowness becomes its most precise reason for being: it allows one to read the territory as one reads a text, paragraph after paragraph, without skipping ahead.

Roero and Langhe form the food and wine heart of the route. These are hills separated by the Tanaro river but profoundly different in geological composition: sands and tuff on the Roero side, calcareous marl and clay in the Langhe. This difference is not merely a matter of soil science — it translates directly into the wines, their aromas, the structure of the grape clusters. Walking these slopes at a human pace means crossing vineyards that produce Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera d'Asti, Arneis, Dolcetto, varieties bearing some of the most recognised designations of origin in Italy. Walkers often find themselves just a few metres from the vines, in a closeness that no visit by car could ever offer in the same measure.

Monferrato, which the walk crosses in its southern portion, adds a further variation. Here the landscape becomes more undulating and less vertical, the rural villages more scattered, the local markets still tied to seasonal rhythms. This is a territory where food culture — Alba white truffle, Tonda Gentile delle Langhe hazelnut, raw-milk cheeses such as Castelmagno and Robiola di Roccaverano — is not separate from everyday life but still forms its economic and social backbone.

Once past the Ligurian Apennines, the landscape shifts register: the woods grow denser, the vegetation turns Mediterranean, the outline of the sea begins to appear in the distance well before it is reached. Savona closes the walk with the logic of a counterpoint: after kilometres of vineyards and hills, arriving at the coast offers a different perspective, almost a sense of release from the inland world. In this sense, the route is not merely a geographical link between two points but a sequence of climatic, cultural and productive transitions that are felt in the body before they are understood by the mind.

AltraVia is neither a pilgrimage nor a sporting itinerary in the strict sense. It is, rather, a device for the slow reading of an inland Italy that exists, produces and transforms itself regardless of the attention it receives. To walk it means choosing to live within that rhythm, to eat where one eats, to stop where the landscape calls for it, to understand why a wine tastes of that place and no other.