The 6 best hidden towns you can reach by train in Trentino-Alto Adige

1. Fortezza

Best for a small town. 1,106 people live here.

41 min from Bolzano · homes €2,200 to €2,500 a m² in the center · 1,106 people

Why visit Fortezza

Fortezza sits at 750 meters in the Isarco/Eisack valley, on the trunk railway line between Bolzano/Bozen and the Brenner pass. The narrows here mark the point where the Pusteria valley joins the main Isarco corridor running north to Innsbruck, which is what drew Austria-Hungary to fortify the site and what still gives the village its railway junction today.

The fortress was designed by Franz von Scholl on direct orders from Emperor Francis I, whose name it carries in German as Franzensfeste. After 1918 it passed to the Italian army.

The village below is small, about 1,100 residents, predominantly German-speaking, built around a single main square, the railway station, and the parish church at its core. The cycle path running through on its way east to San Candido/Innichen keeps the fortress in view for kilometers, a reminder that the settlement below has always been the smaller, later counterpart to the works above it: the valley junction made the place strategically necessary, and the fortress built to hold it is still what the village is organized around.

The catch: January nights average 4 degrees below zero.

What to see in Fortezza

• Forte di Fortezza / Franzensfeste. A 65-hectare complex of three connected forts on opposite banks of the river, built to defend the Isarco/Pusteria junction. Now a permanent exhibition site, with a program covering the architecture and history of the Habsburg defence system and a run as Manifesta biennial venue in 2008.
• Stazione di Fortezza/Franzensfeste. A stone station building from 1867, still in active use, marking the point where the Pusteria branch leaves the main Brenner line.
• Parrocchia di Sant'Eligio (St. Eligius). A parish church from 1820 on the village square, the center of the small German-speaking community before the fortress above it existed.

How to get to Fortezza

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 41 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Fortezza

2. Caldes

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

53 min from Trento · homes €1,200 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 1,111 people

Why visit Caldes

The commune sits at around 700 meters in the lower valley, along the river, thirty-five kilometers northwest of Trento and below the southern ridge of the Brenta Dolomites. It is a scattered municipality of six hamlets: the village itself, Samoclevo, San Giacomo, Cassana, Tozzaga, Bordiana and Bozzana, strung along the slope between 635 and 767 meters, each holding its own cluster of stone houses on the same grade above the river.

The castle at the center of the arrangement was built between 1230 and 1235 by Rambaldo and Arnoldo da Cagnò as a five-storey tower-house, controlling commercial traffic up the valley together with the higher fortification above Samoclevo. It passed to a noble family in 1464, who rebuilt it into the form it holds now, and it belongs today to the autonomous province of Trento as a museum venue.

What emerges is a settlement pattern of small hamlets set at deliberate intervals along a single slope, held together historically by one river route and one controlling tower, and preserved since as a recognized example of that rural arrangement.

The catch: January nights average 3 degrees below zero.

What to see in Caldes

• Castel Caldes. Five-storey tower-house begun in 1230 and rebuilt by the Thun family from 1464, with sixteenth-century painted rooms and coats of arms, now a Buonconsiglio museum venue.
• Borgo di Caldes. Stone-built historic center below the castle, member of I Borghi più belli d'Italia for the preservation of its rural architecture and lanes.
• Samoclevo. Upper hamlet at 767 meters above Caldes, paired in the medieval period with the Rocca di Samoclevo to control traffic on the Val di Sole road.

How to get to Caldes

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 53 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Caldes

3. Innichen

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

1 h 41 min from Bolzano · homes €2,650 to €5,300 a m² in the center · 3,300 people

Why visit Innichen

San Candido, Innichen in German, sits at 1,175 meters in the Alta Pusteria valley near the Austrian border, about forty kilometers west of Lienz and close to the headwaters of the Drava river. The town was founded as a Benedictine monastery in 769 by Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, charged with the Christianisation of the Slavic populations of the eastern Alps.

The monastery was turned into a college of canons in 1143, which is the founding date of the collegiate church that still stands at the center of the town today. The town is bilingual, German first and Italian second; the Italian name San Candido, after the co-patron of the collegiate church, is recorded from 1870, well before the post-1918 renaming of South Tyrol.

The old town, laid out along the Pusteria road with its squares and burgher houses, sits at the foot of the slope that rises directly into the Monte Baranci ski area, so the built center and the mountain terrain meet with almost no transition. To the south the Drei Zinnen, the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, mark one of the most photographed silhouettes in the Dolomites, with Innichen serving as the road, rail and trailhead base for reaching them through Sesto and Auronzo.

East, the valley opens toward the Drava river and Austria, followed for its whole length by the cycle path to Lienz. The town works because of this arrangement: a monastic and Romanesque core, a wall of Dolomite peaks to the south, and open riverine access to Austria to the east, three directions of identity meeting at a single, small, bilingual place.

The catch: January nights average 8 degrees below zero.

What to see in Innichen

• Stiftskirche / Collegiata di San Candido. Rebuilt from 1140 and again from 1240, when the crossing dome received its thirteenth-century frescoes of the Creation, the interior carrying the weight of the building's Romanesque reputation in stone and paint.
• Stiftsmuseum. Chapter museum next to the church, holding thirteenth-century sculpture, manuscripts and liturgical objects that trace the life of the foundation across its centuries as monastery and college.
• Historic centre. Pedestrianised core around the church, with Tyrolean burgher houses, painted facades and the Pflegplatz and Atoplatz squares laid out along the old Pusteria road.

How to get to Innichen

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 1 h 41 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Innichen

4. Toblach

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists Tilia here.

1 h 33 min from Bolzano · homes €3,300 to €4,200 a m² in the center · 3,451 people

Why visit Toblach

Dobbiaco sits at 1,256 meters in the upper Val Pusteria, on the Austrian border, its written record going back to 827. The old settlement, Alt-Toblach, grew around the parish church, while the newer part of town took shape lower down around the railway station built alongside the hotel that opened in 1877, which turned Dobbiaco into one of the first alpine resorts in the Habsburg empire.

Further out in the woods at Alt-Schluderbach stands the cabin where a composer once retreated each summer to write, apart from the hotel guests and the trains. South of the settlement the land opens into the Tre Cime Nature Park, holding an alpine lake with a trail for walkers, and the old railbed continues in that direction as a route over Cimabanche pass toward Cortina d'Ampezzo.

Beyond all of it, reached by way of Val di Landro and Misurina, rise the three spires that anchor the eastern Dolomites. The Gustav Mahler Musikwochen festival fills the town each July and August with concerts named for the man who once needed its quiet.

Taken together, the town reads as three layers set one behind the other: a medieval nucleus, a Habsburg-era resort built on the railway, and beyond both, the mountains and woods that drew a composer to withdraw and now draw everyone else to pass through.

The catch: January nights average 7 degrees below zero.

What to see in Toblach

• Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista. Rebuilt 1764-1774 over the remains of a ninth-century Benedictine chapel, standing at the center of the historic settlement of Alt-Toblach, the nucleus the rest of the town grew around.
• Grand Hotel Toblach. Built 1877-1878 beside the new railway station. The building now holds the nature park visitor center and the Mahler Auditorium, where the composer's name is heard again each summer.
• Lago di Dobbiaco/Toblacher See. Alpine lake south of town in the Tre Cime Nature Park, with a circular educational trail and observation platforms for waterfowl.

How to get to Toblach

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 1 h 33 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Toblach

5. Borgo Valsugana

Best for everyday life on foot. Eight of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

49 min from Trento · homes €1,500 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 7,147 people

Why visit Borgo Valsugana

Borgo Valsugana sits at 380 meters on the Brenta, thirty kilometers east of Trento, in the lower part of the Valsugana valley that carries the road and the railway between Trento and the Veneto plain. The Roman settlement of Ausugum stood on the same site, on the Claudia Augusta Altinate road from Altino to Tridentum, which set the town on a route between the plain and the mountains long before the present center took shape.

The centro storico straddles the Brenta, arcades opening onto the quays on each bank, which is why locals and visitor guides call it the Little Venice of Trentino. The castle above the town looks down on this river center, and the side valley to the west holds the art project among the meadows, so the town reads in three layers: the water level where the old houses face each other across the river, the height of the watchtower on the hill, and the separate, quieter valley given over to the works in natural materials.

The valley was the front line in 1915 to 1916 and much of the historic center was rebuilt after the war, so the painted facades standing over the water today are largely a twentieth-century reconstruction of a much older river town.

What to see in Borgo Valsugana

• Castel Telvana. Medieval castle on Mount Ciolino above the town, built around a square watchtower five meters per side and twenty-six meters high.
• Ponte Veneziano. Fifteenth-century bridge over the Brenta crowned by two aedicules with graffiti inspired by seventeenth-century works of Jacopo Fiorentini.
• Arte Sella. Open-air contemporary art project in the Val di Sella since 1986, with works in natural materials around Malga Costa, including the Cattedrale Vegetale.

How to get to Borgo Valsugana

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 49 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Borgo Valsugana

6. Levico Terme

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

30 min from Trento · homes €1,900 to €2,300 a m² in the center · 8,297 people

Why visit Levico Terme

Levico Terme sits at 520 meters in the Valsugana, twenty kilometers east of Trento, between the Lagorai chain and the high plateaus of Folgaria and Lavarone. The settlement later passed under Habsburg rule and was elevated to city rank in 1894 by decree of Franz Joseph I.

The spa quarter, the park and the lake sit close together at the edge of the old center, with the fort watching all three from the hill above. The historic center, with its imperial-era villas and the parish church of Santissimo Redentore, grew up around the spa rather than the other way round: the streets follow the shape of a resort built in the space of a few decades under Austro-Hungarian rule, rather than a town that predates it.

What survives is a place whose entire layout, from park gate to lakeshore to the fort on the ridge, still reads as the imperial spa it was built to be.

What to see in Levico Terme

• Parco delle Terme. Grounds laid out by Georg Ziehl around the spa buildings and the hotel, with paths shaded by mature planting where the Christmas market sets up each winter.
• Grand Hotel Imperial. Art Nouveau facade facing the park it anchors, still a working hotel after a renovation that kept its original style.
• Terme di Levico. The spa buildings that gave the town its purpose, drawing on water piped down from the mountain springs and still run as a treatment center today.

How to get to Levico Terme

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 30 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Levico Terme