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In an elegant historic mansion you can stay in comfortable rooms, restored respecting the pre-existing eighteenth-nineteenth-century buildings, in which the original period furnishings are integrated with modern comforts such as air conditioning, TV, Wi-Fi will allow you to spend a pleasant stay in the charming village of Piozzo, land of the pumpkin (whose traditional fair takes place every year on the first Sunday in October) and cradle of “Baladin” beer (now known worldwide).
About five kilometers away is Carrù, home of the Fat Ox, where excellent boiled meat can be enjoyed.
Piozzo can be the starting point for excursions in the Langa, discovering castles, vineyards and traditional restaurants. (Alba is about 30 kilometers away, and within this radius are Barolo, Monforte, Serralunga, La Morra, etc.).
The surroundings can also be discovered by motorcycle or bicycle tours, and if extreme relaxation is desired, various walks can be taken in the surrounding countryside, which stretches between the meandering Tanaro River and offers the spectacular views of the tuff gullies.
Less than ten kilometers allow one to merge onto the To-Sv highway, and Cuneo can be reached in just over twenty minutes.
Breakfast is served at the adjacent Baladin House, where meals, prepared by chef Christian Delrio, may also be served.
Access to the rooms is self-contained, and parking č on the square the building overlooks.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the neighborhood where the present Gallo- Basteris house stands was called Cantone sopra la Rocca because it overlooked the Ochera, a depression near the entrance gate to the town, later filled in with topsoil to form today’s July 5, 1944, square.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, various plots of land and small buildings in the area were amalgamated and repurposed, forming the mansion with courtyard, garden, and attached cottages that we still encounter today. The occasion for the ambitious building redevelopment was seized in the marriage celebrated in 1784 between physician Giuseppe Domenico Gallo (ancestors came from Castelletto Stura) and Marta Ricotti, a member of a notable and wealthy family from Piozzo (the Ricottis practiced there as notaries and apothecaries). The Napoleonic Cadastre (1813) reports ownership of the property and its appurtenances to his nephew Alexander Gallo, surgeon, son of a brother of Joseph Dominic having, the latter, no direct descendants. Alessandro’s son, Giovanni Antonio, continuing the family medical profession, resides in this residence with his wife Marianna Bruno from Mondovi. These were the parents of surveyor Alessandro, Municipal Secretary and husband of Annetta Basteris from Garessio, a central figure in the family, who, widowed while still young with a young son, supported by great faith, faced the widowhood situation with determination and resolve.
The beloved son, lawyer Pietro Paolo Cesare Augusto, grateful to his revered mother, advanced and obtained, by Royal Decree of June 9, 1900, the union of the paternal surname Gallo with that of the maternal family Basteris. With the marriage in 1904 of the lawyer Pietro Paolo Cesare to the damsel Maria Vittoria Ricotti from Piozzo, it almost seems to come full circle: in fact, as in the eighteenth century, a Ricotti returned to unite with a Gallo-Basteris. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of this couple, living in various places in Italy, after a period in which they frequented the ancestral home for short vacation periods, alienated the property to the Servetti family in the 1990s.
The arrangement and the external and internal decorations of the mansion (as it stands today) are due, as clearly testified by an inscription preserved on a wall of a small room on the first floor, to the commissioning of Mrs. Annetta Gallo-Basteris, age 64, and her son lawyer Cesare, age 28 ‘in the Holy Year 1900, under the Pontificate of the Great Leo XIII.’ The decorative apparatus, following a typical taste of those years, juxtaposes neo-Baroque decorations with neoclassical references, emphasized by flowers, branches and leaves arranged in tufts, shoots and garlands, which become a recurring motif; Christian religious symbols painted on the ceiling of some rooms stand to indicate the heartfelt devotion of the lady of the house and her son. The signature of G. Falcheri of Mondovi, assisted by a certain C. Rolandone, reiterates that he painted the rooms, the atrium, the staircase and the façade’ of the mansion, a path of representative and private rooms, still recognizable in their original functions: living rooms, dining room, study, library, various bedrooms, etc.
The Gallo-Basteris B&B occupies the main sleeve of the building and is developed in the rooms on the main floor of the ancient mansion; a targeted restoration, conducted by the current owner, arch. Valter Servetti, has enhanced, with attention to the patina of time, architectural details such as the pictorial decorations of some walls and ceilings. ‘There is a sense of the discreet hospitality and gentility of Old Piedmont’…’It feels like entering a house where time has stood still’….’The charm of period homes revisited with a taste and singular attention to detail emerges.
These are some comments from people who, in a preview, got a glimpse of the B&B’s interiors, where, indeed, contemporary functionality is married to courtly environments; where antique furniture and paintings (which seem to have been there forever) are juxtaposed with material pictorial expressions of the twentieth century; where interiors of light and shadow, of reflections and mirages, of pauses and silences, suggest to you sensations of newfound places and things. And the motto ‘Parva domus, magna quies,’ chosen by the former owners and engraved on the front door, is proposed, today as in the past, to welcome guests.
In the entrance of the Gallo-Basteris B&B we find a 17th-century Genoese school painting depicting ‘the Beheading of the Baptist.’ The oil on canvas, with a strong Caravaggesque imprint, comes from an old Carrucese home.
