Porta di Luce

Where a concrete wall once shut a military barracks off from Alba, a ribbon of brushed aluminium now opens the city. Porta di Luce, inaugurated in November 2024, is a monument you do not look at so much as walk through — a fifty-one metre threshold between the streets and the new campus of the city's high schools.

Why it matters

Most monuments commemorate; this one removes. The former caserma Govone barracks site in Alba has been transformed into a "cittadella degli studi" housing the Liceo Scientifico Luciano Cocito and the Liceo Artistico Pinot Gallizio, and the boundary problem was literal: a reinforced-concrete perimeter wall more than three metres high, cutting the schools off from the city. Artist Samuel Di Blasi and architect Ugo Costantino answered the Comune's call for ideas — within the Bando Distruzione programme of Fondazione CRC — by subtracting: demolishing a stretch of the wall and replacing it with an artwork in lost-wax cast aluminium that behaves like a gate without being one. Inaugurated on 23 November 2024, Porta di Luce is public art as urban repair, making it a contemporary landmark in Alba's urban landscape.

What to notice

The work forms a continuous opening of roughly fifty-one metres. Its brushed aluminium surface reflects sky and traffic by day; at night, lighting casts patterned shadows on the ground. The designers describe the form as a long metal "writing": a ribbon of organic shapes without a beginning or end, replacing the straight line of the former military wall. Integrated into the route between Corso Europa and the school campus, the inhabitable sculpture makes the crossing itself part of the work.

Context and history

The installation grew from a convergence of public and private will: a call for ideas by the Comune di Alba, matched with the Fondazione CRC's Bando Distruzione, which funds the transformation of redundant military and conventual properties, and supported by the Provincia di Cuneo, the cultural association Kora and local businesses including the Miroglio Group. The artists describe the intervention as existing between art and architecture: Di Blasi frames it as a subtraction — the removal of over fifty metres of reinforced concrete — with the cast-aluminium work integrated into the new route that now links Corso Europa with the school campus. It is a permanent transformation, not a temporary installation, and the city includes the permanent work among Alba's places of interest. A "Historical Corner" on Corso Europa keeps the memory of the barracks site nearby.