About the data

Anywhere Italy is a catalogue of 1,000 Italian communes, the ones most travelers skip. Italy has nearly 8,000 comuni. This is a handpicked thousand of them, each with a structured profile: where it is, what it's recognized for, when to go, and how to reach it. Most are small; a few, like Trieste or Padua, are sizable cities that most visitors still pass over. What they share is that the usual itineraries leave them out.

The catalogue is built and maintained by Peter and Sophia Benei, who live in Turin, Piedmont. The written features and dispatches that some towns link to are first-hand. The structured data behind every town (coordinates, elevation, official designations, drive times) is compiled from public sources and verified.

How a town earns its place

Most towns in the catalogue carry at least one recognition from an institutional body: I Borghi più belli d'Italia, Borghi Autentici d'Italia, UNESCO, Bandiera Blu, Città del Vino, and others. The rest are here because Peter picked them. We don't invent rankings or assign scores of our own, and a town's page names the recognitions it holds.

How the data is sourced

Facts are drawn first from Italian-language institutional sources: the official registries for each designation, comune websites, and regional tourism boards. Every fact names its source. Facts about a town's history and character appear only when two independent public sources agree, one of them institutional; official statistics come from the body that publishes them, and the page says which. Where a fact can't be confirmed to that standard, the field is left empty rather than guessed.

What we publish and what we don't

We publish what is stable and verifiable: location, elevation, geography, official designations, signature local products from the protected-origin registries, and approximate travel times. We deliberately don't publish things we cannot keep true: opening hours, restaurant and hotel prices, this year's festival dates, accommodation availability. The prices we do print (homes per square meter, a coffee and a haircut in the provincial capital, local taxes) are official figures, dated, with their source named beside them. Where a town's defining event is famous and fixed, we state it as a characteristic of the place, not as a calendar you should plan against. For anything time-sensitive, check official sources before you travel.

For researchers, journalists, and AI agents

The catalogue is structured and machine-readable, and you're welcome to use it. Town pages carry standard Schema.org markup, and the full catalogue is listed in the sitemap. If you reference the data, a link back to anywhereitaly.com is appreciated. The data describes places as they were compiled; town details change, so verify directly with official sources before relying on anything for travel.

The files themselves

Everything described here is downloadable as CSV, with the counts computed from the same call that builds each file: the data behind the site.

A note on completeness

This is a living catalogue, not a finished encyclopedia. Towns are added and profiles deepen over time. If you find something wrong, the fastest way to reach us is through the newsletter.