The citadel of Alessandria is really a disappointing monument! We stopped there accidentally when we were returning to home from our tour of Spain coming from France and passing through the Italian Piedmont region. The citadel, that was built in the 17th century on order of Vittorio Amedeo 2nd of the Savoy dynasty by Ignazio Bertola, is located to the north-west of the historic centre, on the other side of the Tamaro river and we arrived there easily as there are signboards in all the town bringing you there. Unfortunately it belongs to the Italian Army and it is not open to visitors. It looks really impressive and huge on aerial pictures but on the ground you can see only some limited sections of the outer walls from some points that you will find driving around it by car on main roads and trying to cover the lateral streets going towards it. However it is surely everywhere a similar view to that we saw from a lateral section of Pavia Street (we limited us to a stop there), access street to the fortress, in front of the Bridge of the Citadel. Here you are between two well fortified bastions and in front of the monumental main gate. The fortress is however in quite bad conditions.

Surely this place doesn’t deserve a visit and probably even if I couldn’t have a look to its interior I can say that there are probably many other more important fortresses. It seems also that the modern buildings that were built on the southern side of it quite damaged its outer fortifications above all in their underground structures.