Ivrea Beyond Carnival: Adriano Olivetti's Industrial City

Every February, Ivrea hosts one of Italy's most spectacular carnivals: the Battle of the Oranges draws tens of thousands of visitors who leave without having seen almost anything of the real city. Ivrea outside carnival is one of the most unexpected experiences in Piedmont: a medieval city with a Visconti castle and a Romanesque cathedral that houses, within its boundaries, one of the most extraordinary examples of twentieth-century industrial architecture in Italy.

The Olivetti UNESCO Heritage

Since 2018, Ivrea's industrial heritage has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a Twentieth-Century Industrial City. The buildings designed between the 1930s and 1970s for Olivetti — the red-brick factories by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, the Social Services Centre, the company canteen — form an urban ensemble that translated into architecture the humanistic vision of Adriano Olivetti, an enlightened industrialist who conceived the factory as a community. The Ivrea Civic Museum and MAAM document this heritage.

The Castle and the Cathedral

Ivrea Castle — four cylindrical red towers dominating the city from above — was built by the Savoys in the fourteenth century and is open for guided tours at weekends. The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Romanesque with Gothic additions, preserves a tenth-century crypt built under Bishop Warmondo, and medieval mosaics. The medieval old town, with the San Lorenzo Tower quarter, can be explored in an afternoon.

How to Get There and Where to Eat

Ivrea is connected to Turin by train in under an hour; it is reached by car from the A5 motorway, Ivrea exit. The town's restaurants serve bagna cauda, cream risotto and the stewed salt cod typical of the Canavese. The best time to visit the city outside the carnival crush is spring and autumn.