Asti’s tourist office is on Piazza Alfieri (Mon-Sat 9.30am-1pm & 2.30-6.30pm, plus occasional summer Sundays 10am-1pm; tel 0141.530.357, fax 0141.538.200), and has information on the Palio and maps of the town. If you’re intending to go to Asti on the Palio weekend, book a room well in advance; at other times there should be little problem. The best of the inexpensive options are the conveniently sited Cavour at Piazza Marconi 18 (tel 0141.530.222; L90,000-120,000/¬46.48-61.98) and the slightly cheaper Genova , Corso Alessandria 26 (tel 0141.593.197; L60,000-90,000/¬30.99-46.48). As somewhere renowned for its food perhaps should, Asti has a wide choice of restaurants , ranging from basic and cheap pizzerias like Monna Laura , Via Cavour 30 (closed Mon), to places serving local cuisine like Trattoria Aurora , Viale Partigiana 58 (closed Mon), and the excellent Gener Neuv , Lungotanaro dei Pescatori 4 (closed Sun evening and Mon). If you’re into spumante or want to sample the other wines of the region, there is a wine festival from the second Friday to the third Sunday in September, the Festa della Douya d’Or, with wine tastings in the piazzas of the centro storico from primeval evening until midnight.

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.