Beppe Fenoglio’s places in the Langhe (Italy)

Yannick Gouchan (Aix-Marseille Université, CAER, France)

Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) was an important Italian writer during the second half of the 20th century. His entire body of work is set in a specific region of Piedmont, around the small town of Alba, in the Langhe, in the heart of the hills. Describing himself as a “writer and partisan”, Fenoglio devoted a significant part of his work to depicting the Italian Resistance between 1943 and 1945 in these hills. Visitors to the trails around Alba are invited to enjoy an experience that combines reading, the historical memory of the years 1943-1945 with the values it conveys, and walking in the great outdoors, which gives lasting meaning to the visit: “Its Resistance was born in the woods, among the rivers, on the hills, among the ravines, the streams and the trails of its Piedmont” (Pampaloni, 1987).

From a general tourism perspective, Piedmont is, despite its potential for literary tourism, already a very popular destination in Italy. In 2024, it welcomed more than 16 million tourists, 47% of whom were Italian and 53% foreign, mainly from Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States (Osservatorio Turistico Piemonte). The relevant area for Fenoglio’s case is around the city of Alba, with approximately 400,000 inhabitants (in the Province of Cuneo), where winegrowing has gained international recognition, motivating numerous activities related to food and wine tourism (Rech, Mori & Migliorati, 2022). This is why tourism in Alba has long been concentrated in the autumn, the season of grape harvesting and wine tasting, but also of beautiful landscapes coloured by the oxidation of the foliage. Today, the Langhe welcomes tourists year-round (Giacosa et al., 2019). Alba, the capital of the Langhe, built its reputation on its agricultural, wine-producing and commercial past, before industrialisation in the post-war years, notably with the Ferrero chocolate factory and hazelnut farming.

The region’s geography, with the Tanaro River and hills covered in vineyards, is the primary reason for the popularity of tourism focused on natural beauty and landscape. However, it is also the agricultural production that attracts visitors, particularly during the annual international event, the ‘Fiera del Tartufo Bianco d’Alba’, which takes place in autumn and has been held for nearly a hundred years. Finally, the development of facilities and the promotion of local products have been significantly boosted by the Langhe’s inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 (Borsani & Falavigna, 2023). As a result, tourism in the region is currently based mainly on slow, sustainable tourism, as it was here that the Slow Food movement was founded in 1986 in Bra, home to the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

This region focuses on tourism centred on wellbeing, outdoor activities and the quality of local products. In this context, the niche of literary tourism focuses on the places associated with Piedmontese writers: Cesare Pavese in Santo Stefano Belbo, Beppe Fenoglio around Alba, and journalist Davide Lajolo in Vinchio.

Regarding Fenoglio, there is a literary park in Murazzano (not included in the national Literary Park network ‘Parchi Letterari’), the village where the author often set his short stories. This literary park aims to improve the promotion and management of local literary heritage through ‘integrated’ tourism, i.e., tourism that respects the landscape (through a manual of good practices) and provides biographical and bibliographical information on writers.  The website hosts online maps for walking in Fenoglio’s footsteps in the Langhe (www.comune.murazzano.cn.it). The “Centro Studi di Letteratura Storia Arte e Cultura Beppe Fenoglio” (centrostudibeppefenoglio.it/it/categorie/1-8/beppe-fenoglio/i-percorsi-fenogliani, in the section “Fenoglio Tours”, also includes detailed information on the locations with maps of the villages and summary maps of the trails and routes. An iPhone app with the trails was created in 2025 (apps.apple.com/fr/app/fenoglio/id1644390147).

The Fenoglio trails in the region allow walkers to contemplate not only the natural landscape, which has changed over the last seventy years, but also the urban reality of Alba and the author’s villages, such as San Benedetto Belbo and Mango. The urban centre of Alba is part of Fenoglio’s landscape, and it holds a walking route through the places where the author lived and the locations featured in his books (for example, the Hotel Savona, the Tanaro River, and the Ferrero factory in La Paga del Sabato, published posthumously in 1969).

However, Fenoglio’s novels and short stories about the Resistance, such as Il Partigiano Johnny (1968) and Una questione privata (1963), describe a hostile, challenging environment dominated by rain, fog and wind, creating an atmosphere that is the antithesis of a comforting, sentimental landscape (Pesce, 2024). The locations in Fenoglio’s books often correspond to the clandestine soldier’s wandering, forced displacement to hide and avoid arrest, and more rarely to nostalgia for a happy past, such as Fulvia’s house (in Una questione privata), now part of a walking trail called ‘Sulle tracce di Fulvia’ (‘In Fulvia’s footsteps’), from the city centre to the surrounding hills.

The Langhe landscape depicted in Fenoglio’s work is steeped in memories of the Second World War, the German occupation, the civil war against the fascists and the clandestine activities of the Italian resistance. Fenoglio was deeply attached to this agricultural landscape and rarely left it. Most of Fenoglio’s books – except for the Langhe stories, which focus on the agricultural context and the harsh conditions of peasant life – are set during this decisive period of struggle, flight, ambushes, wandering, reprisals, and arrests. It is a biographical landscape, a landscape of pain for literature, indeed, but also a landscape of historical memory that can still speak to the walker-visitor today (Rech et al., 2025).

Fenoglio’s deep connection to his homeland is based primarily on childhood memories, particularly the three consecutive summers he spent between 1933 and 1935 (when he was between 11 and 13 years old) in San Benedetto Belbo, at an altitude of 637 metres, staying with relatives and his brother Walter. The weekends he spent there as an adult with friends also provided the setting for the stories in Un giorno di fuoco (1963). Secondly, the author’s affection for the area cannot be understood without the primordial value of the hills (the Langa), as he wrote very early on in his Resistance notebooks: “It was, with its land, its stone and its woods, the Langa, our great mother Langa.” (Fenoglio, 1994, p. 49).

The clandestine nature of Fenoglio and his fictional characters was necessary to avoid arrest, turning the territory into a precarious place of refuge, survival, and action. It is between two places in the hills, Cascina della Langa and Cascina Isacco in Mango, that the perimeter of Fenoglio’s partisans’ action is mainly located, becoming a space consubstantial with a condition of being-in-the-world. 

The tourist products offered by the Alba region today to visitors seeking out Fenoglio’s locations can be considered tools for interpreting a territory through the pages of literature and the historical memory of the period 1943-1945. A tour of the city of Alba allows visitors to see ‘i luoghi della vita’ (‘the places of life’), Amilcare Fenoglio’s family home and former butcher’s shop, the Govone high school (Liceo), places where he socialised, and sites associated with the short-lived Partisan Republic of Alba, in which he participated. Around town, three trails evoke, respectively, childhood memories, the actions of the Resistance from autumn 1943 onwards, and the fiction the author drew from them. The trail ‘La battaglia dei ventitre giorni’ (‘The twenty-three day battle’) in the protected natural area of San Cassiano, south of the city, evokes the 23-day Republic in October and November 1944, a historical and biographical event and the plot of the short story I ventitre giorni della città di Alba, in the author’s first book published in 1952 (Negri Scaglione, 2006). The ‘Sulle tracce di Fulvia’ trail evokes a fictional character in Una questione privata, but also implicitly a childhood sweetheart of the writer (Benedetta Ferrero, to whom the novel Primavera di bellezza is dedicated, ‘to the girl […]’). The third trail around the city is called ‘Il Fascino del Tanaro’ (‘The charm of the Tanaro River’), which follows the river’s course to Barbaresco and emphasises the relationship between the author, his writings, and the natural elements. Beyond these four trails (urban and suburban), you can visit the ‘Partigiano Johnny’ trails around the village of Mango, a few kilometres from Alba (memo.anpi.it/percorsi/372/sentiero-del-partigiano-johnny/ and www.centrostudibeppefenoglio.it/cgibin/mango_dintorni.pdf). The same applies to the walks between Montemarino, Pavaglione and San Bovo, with references to other works by the author.

How to cite this entry: Gouchan, Y. (2026). Beppe Fenoglio’s places in the Langhe (Italy). In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References 

Borsani O. & Falavigna G. (2023). UNESCO or not? When the brand stimulates tourism: the case study of the vineyard landscape Langhe and Monferrato. CNR-IRCrES Working Paper.  http://dx.doi.org/10.23760/2421-7158.2023.001

Centro Studi Beppe Fenoglio, Alba (website, n.d.). I persorsi fenogliani. centrostudibeppefenoglio.it/it/categorie/1-8/beppe-fenoglio/i-percorsi-fenogliani

Fenoglio B. (1994). Appunti partigiani 1944-1945. Einaudi.

Giacosa E., Rossi M., Festa G. & Ferraris A. (2019). Wine and the “Spirit” of the Territory: The Langhe Case as a Successful Wine Tourism Destination “system”. Tourism Analysis, 24,291–304. https://hdl.handle.net/2318/1706008

Negri Scaglione P. (2006). Questioni private. Vita incompiuta di Beppe Fenoglio. Einaudi.

Osservatorio Turistico Piemonte (website, n.d.). Rapporto dati 2024. www.visitpiemonte-dmo.org/osservatorioturistico/rapporto-dati-2024/

Pampaloni G. (1987). Beppe Fenoglio. In Storia della Letteratura italiana, vol. X, t. II. Garzanti.

Pesce V. (2024). Paesaggi fenogliani in Beppe Fenoglio a Lecce. In F. Moliterni (Ed.), Atti del Seminario annuale MOD-2024 (pp.85–98). Mediazioni Critiche, Collana di Studi Letterari.

Rech G., Mori L. & Migliorati L. (2022). Turismo culturale in Langhe, Monferrato e Roero: Paesaggio, enogastronomia e letteratura. Turistica, XXXI, 207–228. https://hdl.handle.net/11562/1088247

Rech G., Pini C., Migliorati L. & Mori L. (2025). Literary Tourism and Cultural Sustainability: The Landscape of Beppe Fenoglio in the Langhe, Italy. Sustainability, 17 (3). https://doi.org/10.3390/su17031237