Location
Alter Hotel faces Monviso, one of the most beautiful mountains of the whole Alpine mountain range. The town of Saluzzo is close by, as the magnificent and little known Staffarda Abbey and the most beautiful of Savoy’s Castles: Racconigi. At a short distance is also the biggest alpine Fort, Fenestrelle. The roots of the important culinary tradition of the Occitania area can be found here and in the nearby Langhe district. A little known Piedmont.
Alter Hotel is in Barge, Piazza Stazione 1.
History
The building construction began at the end of the 19th Century and finished in the early 1920s. Its design is characterised by a Decò formalism that was typical of industrial architecture of that period. At the beginning, the structure was the place of production of alcohol extracts and fruit jams. When it was purchased by Eng. Vladimiro Giorcelli in 1926, however, it became a textile factory, commercially recorded as ‘Barge Manufacture’.
The production of lace, ribbons, trimmings and fishing lines was mainly oriented toward the National and the Colonial market. The establishment was burned during the Second World War and the production definitively stopped on October 31st 1971. Abandoned since the 1980s, the building has been safeguarded as a prestigious example of industrial archaeology and the current restoration still maintains a Central European atmosphere.
