The 8 best hidden olive oil towns you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Perugia

1. Lucignano

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

1 h 2 min from Perugia · homes €980 to €1,250 a m² in the center · 3,442 people

Why visit Lucignano

Lucignano sits at 400 meters on a hill in the Valdichiana, halfway between Siena and Arezzo, built on a tight elliptical plan of four concentric rings of streets. Its position made it one of the most contested settlements of medieval Toscana: Siena, Arezzo, Florence and Perugia all fought over it between 1200 and 1500.

The current walls and three gates date to a Sienese reconstruction of 1371. In the Museo Civico inside the Palazzo Comunale stands the Albero d'Oro, a 260-centimeter Gothic gold-and-coral reliquary in the shape of a tree, begun by Ugolino di Vieri in 1350 and finished by Gabriello d'Antonio in 1471.

Local tradition turned it into the Albero dell'Amore, a marriage charm. The Collegiata di San Michele Arcangelo dominates the highest ring of the borgo, and the elliptical plan is best read from the air, which is why drone footage of Lucignano keeps appearing in articles about medieval Tuscan urbanism.

What to see in Lucignano

• Albero d'Oro. 260-cm Gothic reliquary in the shape of a tree, gold, coral and enamel, begun by Ugolino di Vieri in 1350 and completed by Gabriello d'Antonio in 1471.
• Centro storico ellittico. Four concentric rings of streets inside elliptical walls, the most complete example of medieval Tuscan elliptical town planning.
• Collegiata di San Michele Arcangelo. Late sixteenth-century church on the highest ring of the borgo, with a Vasari façade adjustment and a baroque organ inside the medieval shell.

How to get to Lucignano

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 1 h 2 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Lucignano

2. Rapolano Terme

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

1 h from Perugia · homes €950 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 5,115 people

Why visit Rapolano Terme

The comune sits at 334 meters on the eastern edge of the clay hills, twenty kilometers east of Siena. It was called simply Rapolano until 1949, when the spa industry pushed the name change, a shift that marks how thoroughly the waters came to define the place.

The thermal facilities and the quarry sit at some distance from each other within the comune: the springs rise near the centro and to its south, while the travertine beds lie in the Serre frazione three kilometers further out, a separate settlement built around the stone rather than the water. The medieval centro storico, meanwhile, holds no thermal or mineral history at all: a fortified perimeter, a Sienese-period castello on the highest point, and a parish church founded in the eleventh century, all predating the spa industry by centuries.

The clay-hill landscape spreads north and west of the comune, and draws most visitors past the spa itself. What emerges is a town built on two extractive industries, water and stone, wrapped around an older walled settlement that has little to do with either.

What to see in Rapolano Terme

• Terme Antica Querciolaia. Six outdoor pools at 38 degrees, the older of the two facilities and the one tied to a general's convalescence.
• Terme San Giovanni. Thermal complex south of the centro among the clay hills of the Crete Senesi, with outdoor pools facing vineyards and olive groves.
• Cave di travertino di Serre. Active quarries in the Serre di Rapolano frazione three kilometers south, the source of the stone behind the Pienza Duomo's façade.

How to get to Rapolano Terme

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 1 h away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Rapolano Terme

3. Chiusi

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list three tables here.

56 min from Perugia · homes €700 to €1,050 a m² in the center · 8,081 people

Why visit Chiusi

The hilltop stands above the Val di Chiana, the valley floor visible from the town at a height that made it defensible and gave it command of the surrounding farmland. The cathedral, the museums and the tunnel network are close enough to walk between within the old center, while the painted necropolis and the lake lie outside it, a few kilometers apart in different directions, one inland toward the tombs and the other north toward open water.

The tunnels themselves connect the upper town to what lies beneath it: built as drainage, later folded into legend by Pliny the Elder, who took them for part of a king's tomb. The cathedral's own columns, lifted from earlier Roman buildings, make the same point in stone that the tombs make in paint and the museum makes in bucchero and alabaster: this is a town built repeatedly on top of itself, each layer reusing what the last one left behind.

What to see in Chiusi

• Museo Nazionale Etrusco. Holds canopic urns, alabaster sarcophagi, bucchero pottery and grave goods pulled from the necropolises around the town.
• Duomo di San Secondiano. Cathedral built around 560 AD over an earlier basilica, renovated in the thirteenth century, nave and two aisles on antique marble columns from Roman buildings.
• Labirinto di Porsenna. Visited from the Museo della Cattedrale, the tunnels run beneath the streets at a scale that still reads as engineering rather than legend, whatever Pliny made of them.

How to get to Chiusi

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 56 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Chiusi

4. Trevi

Best for a stage of a long walk. The Cammino di San Francesco passes through.

45 min from Perugia · homes €690 to €960 a m² in the center · 7,927 people

Written about. No. 90. Read the letter →

Why visit Trevi

Trevi sits at 412 meters on a conical hill above the Spoleto valley, the centro storico still inside the Roman walls of the 1st century BC. The town stood on the Via Flaminia, the consular road from Rome to the Adriatic, and grew into a Guelph commune by the 12th century.

Olive oil is what people come for. Over 200,000 trees blanket the slopes below the walls on near-ideal calcareous, well-drained soils, and the Olivo di Sant'Emiliano, at Bovara by the abbey of San Pietro, is about 1,700 years old, identified with the tree the bishop of Trevi was tied to in 304 before his martyrdom.

The Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime, built in 1487 to mark a miracle, holds a fresco by Pietro Perugino. The centro storico runs in concentric rings up the hill, each ring older than the last, with the Palazzo Comunale and the Pinacoteca holding works by Lo Spagna at the top.

What to see in Trevi

• Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime. Built in 1487 after a Marian apparition wept tears of blood in 1485, with a fresco by Perugino in the Cappella dell'Adorazione.
• Chiesa di Sant'Emiliano. Romanesque parish church at the top of the centro storico, dedicated to the bishop martyred in 304, the patron saint of the town.
• Olivo di Sant'Emiliano. About 1,700-year-old olive tree near the eponymous church, nine meters tall, traditionally the tree to which the bishop was tied before martyrdom.

How to get to Trevi

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 45 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Trevi

5. Montepulciano

Best for Vino Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG. The town gives its name to Vino Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG.

55 min from Perugia · homes €1,600 to €2,400 a m² in the center · 13,032 people

Written about. No. 43. Read the letter →

Why visit Montepulciano

The ridge runs between the Val di Chiana and the Val d'Orcia, 70 kilometers southeast of Siena, and the town follows its spine uphill: streets climb from the gates toward the high point, where the main square sits ringed by the buildings that define the skyline from below. The origin predates the Renaissance fabric by centuries.

Etruscan tombs survive in the surrounding hills, though almost nothing of that period shows in the centro storico itself, which was rebuilt wholesale in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries over whatever came before. The wine and the festival both use the climb as their setting rather than their subject: the cellars are cut into the rock beneath the palazzi, keeping a constant temperature for aging, and the barrel race each August sends two men from each of the eight contrade hauling an eighty-kilogram cask up the same gradient that every visitor covers on foot, only slower.

The steepness that shaped the defensive site nine centuries ago is still what a person feels first, in the legs, before the buildings register at all.

What to see in Montepulciano

• Tempio di San Biagio. A 13-meter dome and travertine façade standing alone outside the walls, the ground falling away below it so the building reads as a single volume against the hillside.
• Piazza Grande. The high piazza at the top of the ridge, ringed by the Duomo, the Palazzo Comunale and the Palazzo Tarugi, all rebuilt in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
• Palazzo Comunale. Town hall designed by Michelozzo in the fifteenth century, its tower offering a view over the Val di Chiana and Val d'Orcia.

How to get to Montepulciano

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 55 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Montepulciano

6. Magione

Best for a day out from Perugia. It is 20 min by car.

20 min from Perugia · homes €820 to €1,050 a m² in the center · 14,680 people

Written about. No. 60. Read the letter →

Why visit Magione

Magione sits at 299 meters on a hill east of Lake Trasimeno, fifteen kilometers from Perugia. The name comes from the Knights Hospitaller, who built a hospital here in the mid-twelfth century dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and called their convent Maison in their own language.

The original nucleus stood on the Perugia-Tuscany route and grew into the fortified base that still anchors the town today. The lower town is organized around two medieval poles: the castle complex near the old route, and the quadrangular tower rising thirty meters over the settlement, built in the same period by the same Order.

The vineyards on the surrounding hills lie between 250 and 350 meters above sea level, and the town's territory extends down to the lake's eastern shore. In October 1502, the castle hosted a plot against Cesare Borgia: his own captains and allies conspired against him inside its walls.

Niccolò Machiavelli, sent by Florence to offer Borgia its support, watched him dismantle the conspirators within months. A hospital, a tower, and a plot against a Borgia: the town's history reads as a sequence of episodes gathered around the same fortified point on the road between Perugia and Tuscany.

What to see in Magione

• Castello dei Cavalieri di Malta. The fortified complex built by the Knights Hospitaller stands as the town's anchor, its walls the setting where the Conspiracy of Magione was plotted against Cesare Borgia.
• Torre dei Lambardi. Thirty-meter quadrangular tower built between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the Gerosolimitani Knights, three floors and a summit terrace.
• Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista. Chapel inside the castle walls, dedicated to the saint of the original Hospitaller foundation.

How to get to Magione

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 20 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Magione

7. Spello

Best for a slow weekend. The Touring Club gives it its orange flag for small inland towns.

31 min from Perugia · homes €1,000 to €1,450 a m² in the center · 8,210 people

Why visit Spello

The centro storico climbs the lower southern flank of Monte Subasio, still contained within the circuit of walls raised when the town was renamed Splendidissima Colonia Julia by Augustus. Before that it was Hispellum under the Umbrians.

The Roman gates and stretches of wall from the Augustan period were not rebuilt over, so the line of the ancient town is still readable in the streets that climb from them today. The same streets carry the Infiorata each June and the fresco Pinturicchio completed for the chapel he painted in Santa Maria Maggiore, two things separated by roughly fifteen centuries but occupying the same short stretch of the old town: the chapel's Annunciation, Nativity and Christ Among the Doctors sit near the piazza the petal pictures are laid across.

A Roman villa with ten mosaic floors, found only in 2005 and left in place under cover, adds a third layer beneath the town that is still being uncovered rather than one that was always on view. The town's Roman skeleton, its painted chapel, and a floor uncovered within living memory all sit within the same small radius, which is unusual: most places show one era at a time, Spello keeps three in view at once.

What to see in Spello

• Cappella Baglioni. The Cappella Bella, commissioned by Troilo Baglioni, with four sibyls ranged across the vault above the painted scenes below.
• Santa Maria Maggiore. Twelfth-century church on Piazza Matteotti, its interior built around the fresco cycle and the later panel it houses.
• Porta Venere e Torri di Properzio. First-century BC gate flanked by two dodecagonal towers, still standing at close to full height with the stonework legible course by course.

How to get to Spello

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 31 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Spello

8. Castiglion Fiorentino

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

51 min from Perugia · homes €1,000 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 12,823 people

Why visit Castiglion Fiorentino

The hill stands between Arezzo and Cortona, above the fertile plain that gives the area its name. The centro storico is layered directly on what came before it: the medieval streets and the fortress at the summit sit on foundations from the fourth century BC, so walking from the lower gates to the top of the town is also a climb through the town's own construction history, one period built on the next rather than beside it.

The upper terrace holds the oldest religious building along with the fortress, while the main piazza lower down gathers the later additions, the parish church, the arcade, and the gallery, into a single civic space. The town carried allegiance first to Perugia, then to Florence from 1384, and was renamed at that moment, a change of name that marks the point where the additions to the skyline, the arcade among them, became possible.

What results is a town where the sightlines do the explaining: the arcade frames the plain because the plain was always the reason to build here, and the fortress crowns the hill because it was already fortified ground long before anyone called it that.

What to see in Castiglion Fiorentino

• Cassero. Fortified core at the top of the town. The tower is reached by climbing through the streets of the centro storico, with the drop toward the plain opening out only at the top.
• Logge del Vasari. The three arches sit at the edge of Piazza del Municipio, so the arcade functions as a frame for the view rather than a monument to walk around. Below it, the Pinacoteca occupies the neighboring building.
• Pinacoteca Comunale. Civic gallery next to the Logge with works by Bartolomeo della Gatta, Margaritone d'Arezzo, Taddeo Gaddi and a notable bust reliquary in gilded silver.

How to get to Castiglion Fiorentino

It has its own railway station. Perugia is about 51 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Castiglion Fiorentino