The wine produced and drunk in Canavese is just like its people. It’s even more noticeable if you're actually from Canavese. Like its people, Canavese wine is enduring.

Canavese is a land of wines boasting a wide variety of crops, landscapes, colours and fragrances which has been under the protection of the Consortium for the Protection and Promotion of DOCG Caluso, Carema and Canavese DOC Wines since 1991. Here, so-called “heroic viticulture” is particularly significant, both in terms of tradition and the landscape.

It’s dawn. On the land that will one day become known as Castellamonte, man begins to shape clay (this area of forests and mires offers an abundance) into vessels, crockery and amulets. Ornate objects, because the beginnings of the concept of beauty are there.

The renowned craftsmanship of Castellamonte’s potters is deeply rooted in the unique nature of this corner of Canavese. The hill of Castellamonte is actually a compacted rock frame gradually advancing from the mountain toward the plains, becoming surrounded by coarse gravel sands covered in pebble-like and clay-rich deposits.

Coppersmith is not just a term, it's a way of life. To start with, you have to be born in the right place. A valley that’s well acquainted with metal, with iron, gold and copper mines. The Orco and Soana Valleys are just the place.

In the Orco and Soana Valleys of Canavese - characterised by mines, forges, and workshops for working copper - there are now eco-museum enterprises helping us to uncover the secrets of a fascinating and traditional trade.

Born in Rueglio in 1851, fatherless, though very close to his mother and sister, his brilliance was exceptional. He was schooled in Ivrea, where he befriended Piero Giacosa and Francesco Ruffini, then studied Physics in Turin (with some misgivings, as it seems he may not have obtained his high school diploma).

Kà ’d-Mezanis is a historical building acquired by Rueglio Council in the nineties after it was fully restored. With a fundamentally rural structure, featuring certain exquisite elements, it is truly architecturally unique in the Canavese landscape.

Camillo Olivetti was born in Ivrea in 1868 to a wealthy family of Jewish descent. He attended the Polytechnic University of Turin, where he studied under Galileo Ferraris, graduating in Industrial Engineering in 1891.

Camillo Olivetti began construction on his factory in 1896 on land he had inherited from his father, Salvador Benedetto. The building was traditional, rectangular and modest in size with two floors characterised by load-bearing structures in reinforced concrete and red brick infill, it was typical of British and American factories in the late nineteenth century.

Natale Capellaro was born in Ivrea on the 22nd of December 1902. The Capellaro family were shoemakers with a home workshop in the heart of the historic quarter, at number 30 Via Arduino, a stone's throw from Ivrea’s Jewish Ghetto where Camillo Olivetti had come into the world.

The Natale Capellaro Foundation was set up in the autumn of 2008 to promote Natale Capellaro, the great innovator, as well as Olivetti values and, more broadly, its technical and scientific culture.

In a note from Vercelli in 1481 (the same year the series of paintings in Ivrea was executed), Spanzotti was called “Maestro”, a title that implies not only that he directed an art workshop, but also recognises his highly specific skills.

On Ivrea’s Monte Navale hill between 1455 and 1457, the church of San Bernardino and Convent for the Order of Friars Minor were built as a sign of devotion to San Bernardino da Siena who is said to have passed through the city in 1418.

Pin Giacosa, who passed away in 1906, achieved a minor miracle: he brought Canavese to the world and the world to Canavese.

A short walk in Colleretto Giacosa and you will discover stories, artworks and figures of both national and international importance.

Local, worldly, brilliant and a bit of a dandy, Guido, known to his family as Gustavo, was also a bit backward, solitary, defiant in the face of fads, and impatient toward metropolitan throngs, therefore a great lover of the countryside, of wooded streets, of simple characters, the illiterate and bearers of an ancient wisdom.

It seems unlikely that a village as small as Agliè could be home to so many wonders, from panoramas and poetry to architecture and industrial feats.

Trained on Tolstoy, Balzac, and Maupassant, and an admirer of Fogazzaro and Gozzano, Gotta churned out success after success. The Vela Saga, which began in 1912 with ‘Pia’, would grow to 29 novels.

Born in Montalto Dora in 1887, Salvator Gotta dedicated his novel ‘Il Castello di Montalto’, [The Castle of Montalto], to his homeland. The book tells stories of emigration and nostalgia rooted in a local context inevitably brought about by industrialisation and cultural transformation.

In 1930, she went to the mountains, to Locana, to teach (“Lord, protect the teacher in the mountains who schools the Alpine children”), where she met Maria Serra, mother of the distinguished linguist Giandomenico Serra. As far as we know, that would be the only high-profile intellectual Giulia would send her first poems to, receiving in exchange a genuine investiture: “This poetry is a dreamlike kiss on the forehead.”

The Giulia Avetta Open-Air Museum of Art and Poetry adds to the allure of the village: thirty ceramic tiles created by students from the Felice Faccio Art College in Castellamonte and mounted on the walls of houses along the main streets of Cossano and its surrounding areas, Avetta, Casale and Francia, each illustrating verses by the Cossano-born poet.

Armed only with a tape recorder, Amerigo Vigliermo, class of 1935, toured Canavese with his travel companions for over fifty years recording folk songs and oral traditions, assembling a documental heritage recognised even beyond Italy for its significance.

The C.E.C. was founded in 1975 by Amerigo Vigliermo and the Bajolese Choir, with its historic facility on Via dei Ribelli in Bajo Doro. Dedicated to Costantino Nigra, it brings together Canavese mountain Communities and towns with the aim of collecting and sharing information on the Canavese people's cultural heritage.

Carlo Botta was born in San Giorgio in 1766. Coming from a family of five generations of doctors, he graduated in medicine from Turin in his early twenties. With little patience for the reactionary attitude in Savoy-ruled Piedmont, he colluded with young Jacobins, getting arrested in 1794 and being imprisoned for over a year. Once freed, though not acquitted, he was forced to flee to France where he joined the Napoleonic army as a doctor.

In a house in the town centre, the birthplace of Carlo Botta, the Nòssi Ràis Museum has been gathering evidence of everyday pre-industrial Canavese life since 1997: work machinery, utensils, furniture, commonly used objects all displayed in themed areas totalling around two thousand pieces.

The astonishing life of Canavese-born Pier Alessandro Garda: fighting for liberal ideals in some of the most famous battles of the nineteenth century; patriot and protagonist in defining moments of the Italian struggle for independence; tireless traveller and collector of exquisite art. And finally, industrious in his golden years spent in Samone, a politician and benefactor.

Situated on Piazza Ottinetti, in the heart of Ivrea, the Pier Alessandro Garda Municipal Museum was reopened in 2014 following Lucia Guelpa’s generous donation to her city as well as contributions from the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation and Regione Piemonte.

Costantino Nigra played a key role in the Risorgimento: Cavour sent him to Paris on a secret mission in 1858 where he was the skilful executor of a plot to get the French Emperor Napoleon III to side with Italy as anti-Austrian.

Sharing the story of Canavese’s greats is another way of rediscovering places of considerable charm. One of these is Villa Castelnuovo, part of the municipality of Castelnuovo Nigra. Graceful and enveloped by the “greenery typical of Canavese,” the village overlooks a sweeping landscape which, as Bertolotti wrote, “gives the impression of being the capital of the valley.”

As philosopher and journalist Norberto Bobbio wrote: “The thick plumes of the times in which we live could not budge him an inch, and whomever tries to reach out to him will find him standing firmly in his place.”

Piero Martinetti’s affinity for books is one of a genuine bibliophile, a passion that led him to purchase first edition texts. His house in the village of Spineto was a true temple of culture, a library that his friend Gioele Solari defined as “the perfect manifestation of his personality.”

A mystical, contemplative approach marked a monastic-like turning point in her life. Through her friendship with bishop Luigi Bettazzi, she was able to settle at a small fraternity in the Albiano Castle near Ivrea in 1970. Her call to the ascetic life came five years later and she moved to the more solitary Molinasso farmstead in Perosa Canavese.

In 1975, when Adriana Zarri came across Molinasso - an abandoned farmhouse in the open countryside of Perosa Canavese, completely covered in brambles and without water or electricity - she decided that this would become her hermitage, and wrote a letter to her friends announcing that she would withdraw into prayer and silence.