PIEMONTISSIMO READING
Why Piemonte Feels Different From the Rest of Italy
and why we have choosen to call it our home
When most people imagine Italy, Piemonte probably isn’t the Italy they see.
The international image of Italy (and the one Hollywood produced movies portray) tends to lean heavily towards the south: sun-bleached villages, colourful houses tumbling towards the sea, scooters, olive groves, tomato-heavy food and a certain wonderful level of organised chaos. Even the countryside version of the Italian dream has largely been defined by Tuscany, with its cypress lined roads, ochre farmhouses and rolling hills.
Then you arrive in Piemonte.
There are still piazzas filled with people drinking aperitivo, old men discussing something very seriously outside the village bar and lunches that somehow consume half the afternoon. Nobody could reasonably mistake it for Scandinavia.
And yet, after spending years living here, we have often remarked that Piemonte feels slightly different from the Italy many foreigners expect to find.
Perhaps that is exactly why we like it so much.
Piemonte has always had one foot in the rest of Europe
Geography explains a lot. Piemonte sits in the north-western corner of Italy, wrapped around three sides by the Alps and bordering both France and Switzerland. Its very name “Piemonte, or at the foot of the mountains” tells you something about the region before you’ve even arrived.
Those mountains have never completely isolated Piemonte from its neighbours. Quite the opposite. Centuries of trade, migration and political connections have left their fingerprints on everything from language and architecture to food.
The region still officially recognises historic Occitan, French, Franco-Provençal and Walser linguistic minorities alongside the Piedmontese language itself.
Then there is the enormous influence of the House of Savoy. Piemonte’s history was closely connected with territories on both sides of the Alps, and Turin eventually became the political centre from which Italian unification emerged. In 1861, Torino became the first capital of unified Italy.
You can still feel that European influence walking through central Turin today. Grand boulevards, elegant covered arcades, historic cafés and restrained Baroque palazzi give parts of the city an atmosphere that can feel as much Lyon or Vienna as stereotypical Italy.
Travel an hour south into the Langhe and the scenery changes completely, but that slightly continental character remains.
Italian spontaneity, with a Piedmontese sense of order
This is harder to quantify, but it is something we have noticed again and again while living here.
Piemontese people are absolutely Italian. People stop for coffee, neighbours appear for a chat when you’re halfway through doing something, food is treated with the appropriate level of seriousness, and we’ve learned never to assume that something will happen simply because somebody said domani.
There is, however, a surprisingly strong sense of structure underneath it all. As Scandinavians, this is perhaps one of the reasons Piemonte has always felt strangely familiar to us.
Italian bureaucracy has a formidable reputation and, trust us, Piemonte has certainly not escaped it. What surprised us wasn’t an absence of rules but almost the exact opposite. There are rules for almost everything.
After several years of renovating a house here, we have become intimately acquainted with geometri, engineers, permits, municipal offices, building regulations, cadastral plans, landscape commissions and pieces of paper we didn’t know existed until somebody urgently needed one.
The system can be maddeningly complicated and its application isn’t always consistent, but underneath the apparent chaos there is often a surprisingly rigid structure. The biggest difference to Sweden is that here most things are possible to solve, exceptions are made and solutions found together with the authorities – so structured but with the best of an Italian touch (absolutely Piemontissimo).
We have noticed the same tendency socially. Piemonte feels relatively reserved by Italian standards and there is often an understated, pragmatic approach to things. People can be wonderfully relaxed about time while simultaneously being extremely particular about how something is supposed to be done. It’s a combination we have grown rather fond of.
The food isn't the Italy many visitors expect either
Perhaps nowhere is Piemonte’s difference more obvious than at the dinner table. If your idea of Italian cooking revolves around tomatoes, olive oil, mozzarella, seafood and pizza, Piedmontese cuisine can come as something of a surprise.
This is a land of butter, beef, cheese, rice, eggs, hazelnuts and truffles.
You find delicate tajarin made with an almost ridiculous number of egg yolks, agnolotti del plin, rich risottos from the rice growing plains around Vercelli, vitello tonnato, raw Fassona beef, polenta, fonduta and, when autumn arrives, white truffle shaved over seemingly everything that will sit still long enough.
Even one of Piemonte’s most iconic dishes, bagna càuda, feels like a wonderful contradiction: a bubbling sauce built around garlic and anchovies in a completely landlocked region.
And then there is chocolate. Turin’s relationship with chocolate developed through its Savoy court culture and eventually gave us creations including gianduiotto and the wonderfully excessive combination of coffee, chocolate and cream known as bicerin. The city’s historic cafés still carry much of that elegant, continental café culture today.
Piedmontese food can be rich and earthy, particularly in winter, and feels deeply connected to the seasons. It isn’t necessarily what many foreigners picture when someone says “Italian food”, which is precisely the point: there really isn’t one Italian cuisine.
There are twenty regions fiercely defending twenty different answers to that question.
Here, wine isn't really a tourist attraction
Obviously we’re biased; we live among the vineyards.
But one of the things we love about Piemonte is how integrated wine still feels with ordinary life, particularly around Langhe, Roero and Monferrato.
Barolo and Barbaresco might sell for eye-watering prices in restaurants around the world, but here wine isn’t something that exists purely behind polished tasting-room doors. The person pouring your glass might have gone to school with the winemaker. Our neighbour Renzo disappears for weeks to help family members picking grapes every harvest. A tractor carrying grapes holding up traffic in September isn’t picturesque local entertainment; it’s just mildly annoying when you’re trying to get somewhere.
The famous wines bring visitors of course, and places such as Barolo can become extremely busy during peak season. But drive ten minutes away and you’re quickly back in villages where viticulture is simply part of the economy and rhythm of everyday life.
That distinction matters.
Piemonte has proper seasons
This was another surprise for us. There is a tendency to imagine Italy as permanently warm, but Piemonte has absolutely no interest in maintaining that illusion.
Summer can be brutally hot, particularly across the plains and wine country, while autumn brings harvest, truffles and the first morning fog hanging between the hills. Winter can mean frost, snow (once in five years for us, but it happened!) and wonderfully atmospheric days when you can barely see the vineyard across the road. Meanwhile, the Alps have an entirely different climate again.
Then spring arrives and everything starts over.
The seasons don’t just change what Piemonte looks like; they change how people live and eat. Menus shift, village events change, agricultural work dictates the calendar and entire foods seem to appear and disappear with remarkable discipline.
It gives the year a rhythm that we hadn’t necessarily associated with Italy before living here. But it also gives our property here more than just a “summer holiday”-house purpose. We can actually come at different times during the year to enjoy different things – ski season being one of them.
And then there is Tuscany...
We couldn’t write about what makes Piemonte different without addressing the obvious competitor. Tuscany. We say competitor with affection, obviously.
Tuscany is perhaps the region that most successfully exported the Italian countryside dream to the rest of the world. Say “Italian countryside” to someone in Stockholm, London or New York and chances are they are picturing rolling Tuscan hills, cypress trees and a stone farmhouse with terracotta shutters. And to be fair, Tuscany is beautiful.
But (and you knew there was going to be a but) we choose Piemonte every day.
The vineyard covered hills of Langhe, Roero and Monferrato give Tuscany serious competition in the “stop-the-car-because-I-need-a-photo”-department, while Piemonte adds the Alps, magnificent lakes and one of Italy’s most interesting cities into the equation. The region’s official tourism organisation rather neatly sums up that landscape as a combination of “peaks and plains… lakes and hills.”
What we particularly love, however, is that Piemonte still feels lived in.
Tourism is hugely important here, particularly around Alba, Barolo and the most famous wine villages, but move a little beyond those hotspots and life hasn’t been rearranged around visitors. The village bar is primarily for the people who live there. The market is where people actually buy their vegetables. Restaurants aren’t necessarily trying to provide an “authentic Italian experience”; they’re simply serving the food they have always served.
You generally encounter fewer international tour groups, fewer businesses designed exclusively for tourists and, outside the best-known pockets, prices that haven’t yet been pushed to Tuscan levels by decades of international demand.
We don’t think Tuscany is overrated (Florence alone rather destroys that argument, we simply think Piemonte still leaves a little more room to discover Italy for yourself.
And yes, we’re biased. This is Piemontissimo after all.
So, is Piemonte really that different from the rest of Italy?
Yes and no. And perhaps that’s the wrong question.
After living here for soon five years, what Piemonte has taught us even more is just how misleading the idea of one homogeneous “Italian culture” really is.
Travel from Sicily to Alto Adige, Puglia to Liguria or Campania to Piemonte and the architecture changes, the landscape changes, the food changes, the dialect changes and, to some extent, even the rhythm of everyday life changes.
Piemonte’s particular version of Italy has been shaped by the Alps, the House of Savoy, France and Switzerland, agriculture, wine, Turin’s royal and industrial history and generations of people who seem to have mastered the peculiar combination of taking lunch very seriously while also having a regulation for absolutely everything.
For us, that combination works.
We get the vineyards and medieval villages, exceptional food and wine, long summer evenings and unmistakably Italian approach to enjoying life. But we also get mountains, proper winters, a slightly more reserved culture and that peculiar Piedmontese sense of order that occasionally feels rather familiar to a Scandinavian and an englishman who somehow ended up renovating an old farmhouse among the vineyards.
Maybe Piemonte isn’t the Italy everyone imagines, but it has certainly become ours.
