Torre Sineo

Directly facing Alba's cathedral, the Torre Sineo is the tallest and best-preserved of the surviving medieval towers in a town once known for its many. Its brickwork and window orders reflect Alba's medieval urban history.

Why it matters

Alba's traditional nickname calls it the "city of a hundred towers" — in Italian, "Città delle cento torri" — an epithet that records how the noble and burgher families of the communal age advertised their wealth: vertically. Most of those towers have been cut down or swallowed by later buildings. The Torre Sineo is the tallest survivor — the local research institute records that only the tower once standing in front of the duomo, demolished in the nineteenth century, likely surpassed it — rising more than 35 metres and standing roughly 20 metres above the surrounding roofline, so it still reads as the vertical landmark of the historic centre.

What to notice

Its masonry rises through three orders of single round-arched windows with stepped Romanesque reveals, then a fourth order of elegant triple-light windows (trifore) on all four faces, many partly walled up to protect them from weather. The plan is nearly square, just under six metres a side, with base walls of 120–150 centimetres that thin as the tower climbs. Regularly spaced putlog holes once carried scaffolding planks, while the hipped roof replaced the original battlements.

Context and history

Specialists date the tower to the second half of the 12th century, at the latest to the early 13th, on architectural grounds and with reference to a document in the abbey of Casanova's cartario: a 1237 record of the monastery buying half of a house with tower in the San Giovanni quarter, possibly this very building. The tower is older than the houses around it and was progressively absorbed into them; the tower and the "casa Sineo" were distinct structures that later merged into one body. Typologically the complex resembles a burgher house with a shop at street level rather than a noble residence. Ownership records trace it from Tomaso Gallino in the early 1600s to Riccardo Sineo by the Napoleonic cadastre of the early 1800s, which gave the tower its current name. A neoclassical column was inserted at street level in 1856 after the structure showed signs of settling, and a seventeenth-century canvas in the town hall still records the tower's position and window typology with striking fidelity.