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DISCOVERING CASALE AND THE SURROUNDINGS

The Basso Monferrato, name with the territory surrounding Casale Monferrato is curiously defined, despite its being at the north of the Acquese and Ovadese Alto Monferrato, is certainly much more, but we love to think of it as the land of the colours. The autumnal colors and vermilions of the vineyards, but also the green of the forests of chestnut trees and of the English oaks that go up the typical sweet hills. It's the land where people going to and fro in the villages contrast with the solitudes of the remote valleys, sprinkled with a few farms that do not wait for anything else than the time of the vintage.

Every hill one wine, one castle, one tower: it is the land where history, often unchanged, reminds us our past and lets us discover its memories, through narrow medieval streets or through mystical abbeys, chapels, churches.

If the look is raised a bit, the limpid sky is seen as a background of purity to the snowy mountains that, in certain days, seem willing to be touched with a finger.

It's a territory that is, perhaps only today, discovering its value: there are currently many initiatives to promote its touristic and cultural proposals and its wine and food production. The Monferrato people have to be thanked with the effort of the local agencies.

Inhabited since the Roman times in a place called Vardacate, identified today with Casale, the Monferrato received later on the Longobards (the names in “-engo” date back to them) and the Moors (Giarole is even said to have been an ancient Arabic port)

Around the 1.000, at the end of the invasions, this zone begins its tradition of independence. The legendary ride of Aleramo, who with his horse encircled the borders of his Marquisdom in front of the Emperor, commenced that dynasty that consolidated the force of the State and created that lifestyle of court that Carducci celebrated as “the Parnassus of Italy”. He had as his descendants Guglielmo IV, Guglielmo VI, Corrado (also elected "King of Jerusalem" for the role played in the Crusades), Ranieri and Bonifacio. The symbol of the family is its founder's tomb, of Aleramo, in the aisle of the abbey of Grazzano Badoglio. The Paleologi followed the Aleramici, then Mantua's Gonzagas and, after disputes and a besieges similar to the ones described by Alessandro Manzoni, the Monferrato reached finally the Savoias and, from them, Italy.

Introducing the Monferrato is not simple: it is in its overall beauty, in the harmony of its hills that it has its fashion. The itineraries that we present are therefore just simple suggestions, that we invite, if you can, to abandon as soon as possibile, to get lost, also without a precise goal, through the colours of the Monferrato.

- THE CITY OF CASALE MONFERRATO