How a Hotelier Made the Alba White Truffle Famous
The Pantry Pulse, 7 October 2026.
The International Alba White Truffle Fair opens its 96th edition this Saturday in Alba, in Piedmont, and runs into early December. At its center is a market where truffle hunters and traders sell fresh white truffles under the supervision of a Quality Commission. The fair grew out of one Alba hotelier's promotion, and his story explains how a fungus that cannot be farmed became a reason to travel to a Piedmont town.
What Opens in Alba on Saturday
The fair runs from 10 October to 6 December 2026, organized by the Ente Fiera di Alba under the theme Autentiche Relazioni, or authentic relationships. Its main event is the Alba White Truffle World Market, an exhibition area in the city center where trifulau, the truffle hunters, and traders sell truffles from the woods of Piedmont. Judges selected by the National Truffle Study Centre help buyers choose, and the Langhe tourism board describes every product on display as checked and guaranteed by a commission of experts. Around the market run cooking shows, cooking classes, the Vinum Alba wine tastings and a Barolo Meets Rioja masterclass and gala dinner.
The fresh truffle keeps its own calendar. Piedmont opened the white truffle season on 1 October, a date the region pushed back by about ten days in 2024 to protect the truffle from climate change, and the season closes on 31 January. Marco Gallo, the regional councillor for biodiversity and truffle-growing, said at the time that gathering truffles before they ripen risks compromising the harvests of later years. The hunt, the rules and the prices are covered in the white truffle season story.
The Hotelier Who Sold a Truffle
The Piedmontese truffle had admirers long before Alba built an event around it. According to the fair, the courts of eighteenth-century Europe counted it among the most delicious foods. Its worldwide fame came in the twentieth century, and the fair credits it to the promotional work of Giacomo Morra, who ran the Hotel Savona and its restaurant in Alba. The Langhe tourism board gives his dates as 1889 to 1963. Linkiesta, an Italian news site, says he was born in Alba and came home after working in restaurants in Turin. In its account, he wanted truffles for his hotel's kitchen at a time when few people in Alba went out to find them, so he asked the parish priests to urge the faithful, during Sunday sermons, to go and hunt them. The Langhe tourism board credits him with giving the product the name it still carries, the truffle of Alba.
The dates of what followed depend on who tells the story. According to the tourism board, Morra added an exhibition devoted to the truffle to Alba's 1928 harvest fair, and the following year the town held its first exhibition and competition for Langhe truffles. The board says the local paper, the Gazzetta d'Alba, used the words Truffle Fair for that event in an article of 17 October 1929, announcing that truffles would be laid out on benches in the Cortile della Maddalena. Linkiesta dates Morra's first truffle at Alba's fair to 1929, a year later than the board, and says the fair took the name Fiera del Tartufo only in 1933. That same year, by the fair's account, The Times of London crowned Morra the King of Truffles, and Linkiesta adds that the fair filled a full page of The Times on 28 November 1933.
From 1949, according to the tourism board, Morra sent the year's finest truffle to a famous figure: the actress Rita Hayworth first, President Harry Truman in 1951, Winston Churchill in 1953, and Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in 1954. Linkiesta and Quotidiano Nazionale both name Monroe and Churchill among the recipients and add Alfred Hitchcock. Linkiesta calls the gifts perhaps the most forward-looking marketing campaign in history, run before social media, the internet, television or the big supermarket chains. The fair became a national event in 1963, the year Morra died, and took its present international name in 2007, according to the tourism board.
The Alba white truffle cannot be cultivated; it grows from the roots of particular plants and is found with a trained dog. The fair says it keeps for about a week and should not be cooked, only shaved raw with a truffle slicer. UNESCO added Italian truffle hunting and extraction to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2021, describing knowledge passed down orally for centuries. Morra's promotion put the attention on the place and the season: a fair to visit, and one truffle a year sent to someone the public was watching.
Alba's Truffle Story, Source by Source
The fair, the Langhe tourism board and Linkiesta agree on the man and on the years around 1930, but not on every date. Set side by side with Piedmont's own announcements, the record looks like this:
| Year | What happened | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| 18th century | European courts prize the Piedmontese truffle | The fair |
| 1928 | Morra adds a truffle exhibition to Alba's harvest fair | Langhe tourism board |
| 1929 | First truffle exhibition and competition, called the Truffle Fair by the Gazzetta d'Alba on 17 October | Langhe tourism board, with Linkiesta also dating Morra's truffle at the fair to 1929 |
| 1933 | The fair takes the name Fiera del Tartufo | Linkiesta |
| 1933 | The Times of London names Morra King of Truffles | The fair, with Linkiesta dating a full Times page to 28 November |
| 1949 | First celebrity truffle, to Rita Hayworth | Langhe tourism board |
| 1963 | The fair becomes a national event, and Morra dies | Langhe tourism board |
| 2007 | The fair becomes international and takes its present name | Langhe tourism board |
| 2024 | Piedmont moves the white truffle opening to 1 October | Piedmont region |
| 2026 | 96th edition, 10 October to 6 December | The fair |
The table also shows something no single source states. Counting 1929 as the first year, the 2026 fair falls in the 98th autumn, yet the fair numbers it the 96th edition, so the edition count runs two behind the calendar. Piedmont's 2024 announcement called that year's fair the 94th, which fits the same count. Within the tourism board's own account, 1928 and 1929 mark two different starts: Morra's first truffle exhibition, then the first fair devoted to the truffle a year later.
From Alba to a Denver Kitchen
Alba's handling rule is the part that travels: truffle goes on at the end, raw, over something warm. Tajarin, risotto, a fried egg and fonduta are the Piedmontese carriers, and that table is set out in the Piedmont in autumn guide.
The same last-minute habit works with jars and bottles. Morelli's truffle egg pappardelline (shop Morelli Pappardelline with Truffle) can be tossed with butter and a little pasta water, then finished at the table with a pinch of Jacobsen's white truffle salt (shop Jacobsen White Truffle Salt). The salt also goes on a fried egg the moment it leaves the pan, and the maker's story is in the Jacobsen Salt producer guide. Regalis white truffle olive oil (shop Regalis White Truffle Oil) goes on in drops, once the pot is off the stove, over risotto or the polenta with mushrooms recipe. The wider category is covered in the truffle products guide.
Morra took a truffle that keeps for about a week and made it a fixed date on other people's calendars.
Sources & Further Reading
- International Alba White Truffle Fair, home page and 2026 edition
- International Alba White Truffle Fair, events calendar
- Alba White Truffle World Market
- Autentiche Relazioni: vision and identity of the 2026 edition
- The Truffle, International Alba White Truffle Fair
- The Alba White Truffle season
- How truffle is stored and cooked
- Palio and folklore events, 2026
- Langhe tourism board: International Alba White Truffle Fair
- Langhe tourism board: Characters of truffles
- Linkiesta (2022): Giacomo Morra and the Alba truffle fair
- Quotidiano Nazionale (2025): Alba, Cherasco and the Langhe
- Regione Piemonte: Dal 1° ottobre la cerca del tartufo (2024)
- UNESCO: Truffle hunting and extraction in Italy, traditional knowledge and practice
