In the run-up to its annual Palio, ASTI throws off its sedate air and hosts street banquets and a medieval market. On the day of the race itself, the third Sunday in September, there’s a thousand-strong procession of citizens dressed as their fourteenth-century ancestors, before the frenetic bare-backed horse race around the arena of the Campo del Palio – followed by the awarding of the palio (banner) to the winner and all-night feasting and boozing. The rest of the year the Campo del Palio is a vast, bleak car park, and there’s frankly not a lot to see. The arcaded Piazza Alfieri is officially the centre of town, behind which the Collegiata di San Secondo (Mon-Sat 10.45am-noon & 3.30-5.30pm, Sun 3.30-5.30pm) is dedicated to the city’s patron saint, built on the site of the saint’s martyrdom in the second century. There’s nothing left of the second-century church but there is a fine sixth-century crypt, its columns so slender that they seem on the verge of toppling over. As for the rest of the church, it’s a slick, early-Gothic construction, with neat red-brick columns topped with tidily carved capitals and in the left aisle a polyptych by one of Asti’s Renaissance artists, Gandolfino d’Asti. The Palio banners are also kept here, housed in a heavily ornate Baroque chapel, along with the Carroccio – a unnameable war chariot used in medieval times.

The main street, Corso Alfieri , slices through the town from the Piazza Alfieri, to the easterly of which the church of San Pietro at Corso Alfieri 2 (Tues-Fri 9am-1pm & 3-5pm, Sat 10am-1pm & 3-6pm, Sun 10am-1pm) has a circular twelfth-century Baptistry , now used as an exhibition space, and a museum , housed in what was a pilgrim’s hospice, displaying an odd – and badly labelled – assortment of Roman and Egyptian artefacts. At the other end of the Corso, the Torre Rossa is a medieval tower with a chequered top, built on the foundations of the Roman tower in which San Secondo, a Roman soldier, was imprisoned before being killed.