Riso & Rose in Monferrato
A month-long spring festival spread across some thirty Monferrato comuni — food and wine, floriculture, crafts and music — with Casale hosting concerts and readings in its churches, synagogue and Philharmonic Academy.
Why it's special
It's the region introducing itself for a month: rice paddies and rose gardens, cellars and courtyards, thirty-odd towns each doing their own thing. In Casale the music side is unusually good — sacred and choral concerts in San Domenico and Santa Caterina, Jewish-tradition music in the synagogue.
- There's no single ticket or venue — pick a weekend and a cluster of towns and build a loop.
- In Casale itself the draw is the concert and reading programme in the churches, the [synagogue](/attractions/casale-monferrato-sinagoga-e-museo-ebraico) and the Philharmonic Academy.
- Dates and the full comune list go up each spring at monferrato.org; the tourist office is on 0142 444330.
For most of May the Consorzio Mon.D.O. turns the whole Monferrato into one long open weekend, over and over: some thirty comuni across the provinces of Alessandria, Asti, Vercelli and Pavia, each with its own food, wine, flowers, crafts and music. Riso & Rose — rice and roses, the paddies of the plain and the gardens of the hills — is less an event than a season, and you take it a weekend at a time.
Casale plays to its strengths, which are acoustic. The programme puts concerts and readings in the churches of San Domenico and Santa Caterina, in the synagogue on Vicolo Salomone Olper, and at the Philharmonic Academy — classical, choral, lyric and music from the Jewish tradition, in rooms that were built to carry it.
There's no gate and no single ticket: you pick a corner of the region and follow the map. The exact dates and the roster of towns change each year and land in spring — check monferrato.org before you plan.