This morning, in a small town in Piedmont, people will line up in a stone courtyard to look at something brown, lumpy and roughly the size of a walnut. Some of them will pay more for it than they paid for their shoes.
I have never bought one. But every October, that little brown thing changes the way I look at an entire color, and it took me years to understand why.
A town that opens on a Saturday
The town is Alba, and today is the opening day of the 96th International Alba White Truffle Fair. It runs every weekend from October 10th to December 6th, and at its center is the World Truffle Market in the Cortile della Maddalena, open on Saturdays and Sundays.
The white truffle of Alba, Tuber magnatum Pico, grows underground among the roots of trees in the hills of the Langhe, Roero and Monferrato. It cannot be farmed the way a vegetable is. It has to be found, by the trifolao, the truffle hunters, and their dogs. In 2021 UNESCO added the knowledge and practice of truffle hunting in Italy to its list of intangible cultural heritage.
At the fair, every truffle is examined by a quality panel before it can be sold. Rossini, who loved them, is said to have called the truffle the Mozart of mushrooms. The fair itself grew out of a harvest festival in 1929, and much of its fame is owed to one man, Giacomo Morra, a hotelier in Alba who began sending the finest truffle of each season as a gift to famous people. Marilyn Monroe received one. So did Alfred Hitchcock and Winston Churchill. In 1933, The Times of London called him the King of Truffles.
Brown, the October way
What I love about Alba in October is that the whole landscape seems to agree with the truffle. The vines turn. The fog comes up from the valleys in the morning, so reliably that Nebbiolo, the grape of Barolo and Barbaresco, is widely thought to take its name from nebbia, fog. Stone, bark, wet earth, chestnut. It is a brown place, and it is beautiful.
And that is the lesson, because most of us have a complicated relationship with brown. We think of it as safe, or dull, or the color of an office carpet. In Alba, nobody treats it that way. The most valuable object in town is brown. In Alba, brown is the color of the thing people cross the world for.
The difference is texture. A flat brown can look tired. A brown with something going on in it, a weave, a grain, a check, catches the light and looks alive, the way a truffle's rough skin or a hillside of turning vines does.
Three browns, no black
So here is what I would pack for a weekend in Alba, and what I wear in Sarasota once October arrives, even when it is still eighty-five degrees at lunch. Not one brown, but three, each with its own surface.
A bag woven by hand from Italian leather in a dark chocolate, the tight basket weave doing the work a print would do elsewhere. A slim chestnut belt with a gold-tone buckle, to add a second, warmer brown at the waist. And a small brown-and-cream check, like the vest and pleated skirt-trousers in the photo at the top, where the cream keeps the brown from getting heavy.
Put those three together and something happens that never happens with a single flat brown. The outfit reads as rich rather than serious. It also means you can leave black at home for a while, which in October feels right. Black belongs to the city in winter. Brown belongs to the hills in autumn.
If you are choosing a leather bag this season, a woven brown one is a good place to start. We wrote about what to look for in how to choose an Italian leather bag, and the chestnut belt is the easiest second brown there is.
You don't need a truffle to borrow the idea. You just need to stop thinking of brown as the color you wear when you can't decide, and start treating it the way Alba does this weekend: as the thing everyone came to see. The woven browns are in the bags.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
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