Our first full day in Alba was an easy day of getting acquainted with our surroundings. After sleeping in a little bit, we walked down to the Piazza Risorgimento to meet up with Jan and Dave for lunch.

Many more people were out today as the weather is beautiful. The main street of town has lots of shops and little restaurants and wine stores. One store was proudly displaying their tartufo bianco d’Alba or white truffles of Alba as we walked along. They are so expensive, but so delicious.

We arrived at Piazza Risorgimento (also known as Piazza Duomo) since it is the location of the Duomo. I did not take photos today as they had lifting equipment there while performing some maintenance work. I looked the other way and the town’s major bell tower stood proudly, although it did have a little lean to it – watch out Pisa!

Once we met up with Jan and Dave, we found a nice place right near the Duomo called, wait for it, Ristorante Bistrot Duomo.

We had a nice lunch with two bottles of Arneis. Between us, we had their pizza, a seafood medley and tajarin pasta with black truffles. Only I was willing to take the leap and had a tiramisu to finish things off, and it was delicious.

After lunch, we walked over to Jan and Dave’s apartment to drop off some stuff and pick up a bit of some cake that their landlord had provided for them. We then followed the route we would take to get to the Piazza to meet our guide and driver for tomorrow’s tour, plus we located the restaurant for dinner tonight.

We made a quick stop at our apartment to drop off the cake and to catch up on emails and messages. Having the two apartments instead of a hotel is a change and using Airbnb is definitely saving a few dollars.

We headed out to the Ape Wine Bar to meet up with Martina, who had our itinerary printed out, plus tickets for our Underground Archaeological Tour next weekend. We got to know each other and enjoyed a nice bottle of La Spinetta Barbera D’Asti. If they had that in meetings back home, I’d probably still be working. Not!!

Afterwards, we headed back to the apartment to relax for a while before dinner. We looked over tomorrow’s itinerary; we will be visiting three different wineries and will have a picnic lunch.

On the agenda tonight is dinner at Osteria dell’Arco. Besides having a nice overall ambience, they have a tremendous selection of wine, great food, very reasonable prices and it is a favorite of the locals.

I’ll just list a few of our meal courses: pumpkin soup with hake (it’s a fish), Potato gnocchi, Ravioli de plin, braised lamb and roast chicken. We selected a Nebbiolo D’Alba wine and finished up with Gianduja Chocolate mousse and panna cotta with fresh berries. Everything was superb!

It was just a short walk back to the apartments to relax and prepare for tomorrows outing.