Alba has roughly 31,000 residents, and between 10 October and 6 December it will host something like 600,000 visitors, most of them there for a knobbly beige fungus that nobody has ever managed to farm. The Fiera Internazionale del Tartufo Bianco d'Alba, now in its 96th edition, is built around that fungus, Tuber magnatum Pico, which the fair's own list of facts says can only be found with a trained dog and cannot be cultivated. Piedmont's official harvest season opened on 1 October and runs to 31 January 2027, so the fair covers the best part of it in nine consecutive weekends of market stalls, cooking demonstrations and restaurants that build whole menus around a few grams of shavings. Getting there from Britain is the easy bit, with direct flights of around two hours to Turin and a rail line that carries you from the airport through Turin and Bra to Alba itself. The hard bit is choosing the weekend, because the nine are not equal, and the wrong one costs you either money or elbow room. The opening weekend, 10 and 11 October, is only six days away, which rules it out for most people.
What the fair is, and the one part that costs money
Wandering around Alba during the fair costs nothing: the streets are dressed for it, restaurants put truffle on the menu from the first of the month, and nobody asks for a ticket. The ticketed part is the Mercato Mondiale del Tartufo Bianco d'Alba, held in the Cortile della Maddalena with its entrance from Piazza Falcone, and it opens only on Saturdays and Sundays, from 9.30am until early evening. Entry is about €6, roughly £5, although guides quote anything from €5.25 online to €6.30, so check the official ticketing page before you go. Inside, the truffle hunters sell their own finds from stalls, with each truffle weighed, graded and sold with a receipt after the fair's quality commission has inspected it, which is the real reason to buy here rather than from anyone who simply says they have a good one.
The trap catches people every year: the market is closed from Monday to Friday. Turn up on a Tuesday in November and you will find decorated streets, full restaurants and no stalls at all. The town's truffle museum, MUDET, beside Piazza Falcone, is the sensible weekday substitute, at €5 for adults and open from 10.30am to 6pm every day except Tuesday, according to the fair's own 2025 visitor page, so confirm the hours before you travel. It covers the hunt itself, a tradition inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list, and includes Steve McCurry's photographic project Truffle Hunters and Their Dogs.
Which weekend to pick
Go on a Sunday morning in mid-November, and book the hotel this week.
That recommendation comes from the calendar, which has several weekends you should avoid unless your diary leaves you no choice.
| Weekend | What to know |
|---|---|
| 10–11 October | Opening weekend: the highest energy, and the earliest, scarcest truffles |
| 24–25 October | The weekend before English and Welsh half-term (26–30 October) |
| 31 October–1 November | All Saints' long weekend; expect Italian domestic crowds |
| 7–8 November | World Truffle Auction at Grinzane Cavour Castle on Sunday 8 November |
| 14–15 and 21–22 November | My pick: past the holiday rush and the auction, with supply usually better than at the start |
| 5–6 December | Closing weekend |
Price is the other reason to wait. Truffle prices swing hard within a single season, and the opening weeks are the expensive ones. Reported figures for 2025 vary by source, but they agree on the shape: a steep rise in the first weeks, with most reports putting a medium-sized white truffle at about €400 per 100 grams in mid-October and about €500 by 1 November, and some guides describing the price easing again by late November and December. For scale, a small truffle of 10 to 15 grams, enough to shave over two plates of pasta, typically costs in the region of €50 to €70, which is roughly £40 to £60. A later weekend is not a guarantee, though. Late-summer rain decides how big the crop is, and in a thin year the stalls can look sparse and the prices can stay high well into November.
Saturday afternoon in the Cortile della Maddalena is the worst slot of the week, because every visitor with a normal job arrives on exactly the same two days. Go on Sunday, be at the gate when it opens at 9.30am, and you will see the stalls before the crowd builds.
The auction deserves a line of its own. The 27th Asta Mondiale del Tartufo Bianco d'Alba takes place on Sunday 8 November at Grinzane Cavour Castle, a charity sale with bidders linked in from abroad, and last year's final lot, a single 1,009-gram truffle, went to a bidder in Hong Kong for €110,000. It is a spectacle for the food press rather than something a visitor can drop in on, so do not build a trip around it.
Getting there from the UK
Ryanair flies to Turin Caselle from London Stansted and Manchester all year round, and British Airways does the same from Gatwick, according to a route list updated on 25 September 2026. easyJet, Jet2, TUI and Wizz Air add more routes, but most of those are timed for the ski season, so check that your dates are covered before you plan around them. Flying time is roughly 1 hour 45 minutes from London and 2 hours 15 minutes from Manchester. Fare-finder pages advertise one-way tickets from about £29 to £33, but those are the cheapest dates in the calendar rather than fair weekends, so price your actual dates before you commit to a hotel.
From Turin, the train beats the car. Trenitalia's SFM4 line runs from Turin Caselle airport through Turin and Bra to Alba, with one train an hour on weekdays and about half an hour between the airport and Turin. The Turin to Alba leg takes roughly 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes, with fares from about €7, but regional timetables shift at weekends and a few times a year, so check trenitalia.com for your actual date.
Do not drive into Alba. The historic centre is a limited-traffic zone, a ZTL, which means ordinary cars cannot enter without a permit, and on fair weekends parking is the thing that goes wrong. If you want the vineyards as well, hire a car for the weekdays and leave it outside the centre on market days.
Where to sleep, and when to give up on Alba itself
Alba is a town of roughly 31,000 people trying to host several times that number, so rooms in the centre are scarce and the best weekends sell out months ahead. If you are looking this week, assume the obvious Alba hotels are gone for the popular dates and start with Bra, Asti, or the Langhe villages of La Morra and Barolo, which usually sit 20 to 30 minutes from Alba by road. Bra is also on the same rail line, on the Turin side of Alba, which makes it the easiest base if you are coming without a car. Whatever you pick, decide how you are getting back to the hotel before the evening starts, not after a few glasses of Barolo.
Buying truffle, and what to do with it afterwards
Buy inside the market, where the quality commission has already been through the stalls, and ask a few things before any money changes hands. A seller working under the fair's supervision has no reason to dodge any of them.
- Ask the seller to weigh it in front of you.
- Ask what it is and where it was found: you want Tuber magnatum Pico, the Alba white, not a black truffle or a lesser white at a hopeful price.
- Expect a receipt with a legitimate sale.
- Other questions are fair game too, such as how long it has been out of the ground.
Once it is yours, the fair's own advice is simple. Keep it in the fridge, wrapped in blotting paper inside a lidded glass container, and plan to eat it within about a week. Clean it with a small brush under running water, let it dry and rest for at least ten minutes, and never cook it: it is shaved raw over the finished dish with a truffle slicer, traditionally over tajarin, the thin egg pasta of the Langhe. Buy small. A 10 to 15 gram truffle is dinner for two, and anything bigger means eating truffle every night for a week or watching it fade in the fridge.
If you would rather not carry a raw truffle around a hotel room, order it shaved at a restaurant instead. A kitchen typically uses 8 to 10 grams a plate and prices it accordingly, and a menu line that says "truffle at market price" means exactly that.
Two weekdays in the Langhe, and a hunt with a dog
Barolo and Barbaresco, the villages that gave their names to Piedmont's most serious Nebbiolo reds, sit within about 20 to 30 minutes' drive of Alba, and they are far quieter on a Monday or Tuesday than the market is on any Saturday. La Morra offers a wide view over the vineyards, and Grinzane Cavour Castle belongs to the UNESCO-listed vineyard landscape of Langhe-Roero and Monferrato, with visits possible outside the auction date, though you should check opening days before you drive out. November in these hills can be foggy and cold, so pack a proper coat and treat it as the right weather for the food.
If you book one activity besides the hotel, make it a truffle hunt. A guided outing with a licensed trifolao and his dog lasts about two hours at Monforte d'Alba and starts at around €50 a person with at least one local operator, roughly £40 to £45. The big booking platforms list similar outings from about US$92, and on some tours the hunter's fee is charged separately, in cash, on the day, so read the small print. The dog does the finding and the trifolao does the digging with a small hoe, pressing the soil back down afterwards so the ground can fruit again. Wear boots, and ask before you set off whether anything the dog finds stays with the trifolao. It usually does.