The 6 best hidden towns with a serious restaurant that you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Perugia

Trequanda

Why visit Trequanda

Trequanda is three villages in one comune: Trequanda itself at 453 meters, Castelmuzio, and Petroio at 486 meters, scattered across the hills southeast of Siena. The first written record dates to 1198, when the Cacciaconti of Scialenga held it as fief; in 1211 Emperor Otto IV gave them the right to collect tolls.

In 1553 the village was among the first to be annexed to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The Cacciaconti castle still anchors the centro storico, the Pieve dei Santi Pietro e Andrea next to it, built from 1327 in a Gothic-Romanesque mix and renovated in the Renaissance.

Petroio has produced fine ornamental terracotta since the early sixteenth century: lions and dogs and pineapples and chimney pots, the surface of half the gardens in central Tuscany. The municipality holds the Orange Flag from the Italian Touring Club and was inscribed in 2018 in the national register of historic rural landscapes.

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What to see in Trequanda

• Castello dei Cacciaconti. Medieval fortress at the center of Trequanda, seat of the Cacciaconti di Scialenga from the twelfth century.
• Pieve dei Santi Pietro e Andrea. Gothic-Romanesque parish church begun in 1327, expanded in the Renaissance, holding a fresco attributed to Sodoma.
• Castelmuzio. Walled hilltop frazione between Trequanda and Pienza, on the rural landscape register, the smallest of the three borghi.

How to get to Trequanda

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Perugia is roughly 70 minutes away by road.

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Rapolano Terme

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.

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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

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Perugia is roughly 63 minutes away by road.

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Chiusi

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.

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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

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Perugia is roughly 58 minutes away by road.

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Passignano sul Trasimeno

Why visit Passignano sul Trasimeno

Passignano sul Trasimeno sits on a low promontory on the northern shore of Lake Trasimeno, twenty kilometers northwest of Perugia, separated from the lake only by the road that links Perugia to Tuscany. The Umbri held the ground first, then the Etruscans pushed them east of the Tiber; the Romans turned the spur into a watchtower controlling the pass between northern and central Italy.

In 217 BC Hannibal trapped Gaius Flaminius's army of 25,000 in the narrow road between Tuoro and Passignano, killing about 15,000 Romans in the morning fog of June 21, one of the worst defeats in Roman history. The Rocca, built around 850 by the marquises of Tuscany and conquered by Perugia in 1187, holds a quadrangular plan around a 32-meter keep that survived a 1778 partial demolition.

The Festa della Padella, held in late August, fries lake fish for the village in a four-and-a-half-meter pan on the shore. The Borgo dei Borghi finalist designation arrived in the 2010s.

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What to see in Passignano sul Trasimeno

• Rocca di Passignano. Quadrangular fortress built around 850 by the marquises of Tuscany with a 32-meter central keep, partly demolished in 1778.
• Chiesa di San Bernardino. Sixteenth-century church near the Rocca with a Renaissance interior and views down to the lake from its portico.
• Centro di Documentazione Annibale e Battaglia del Trasimeno. Small documentation centre on the Battle of Lake Trasimene of 217 BC and Hannibal's ambush of Gaius Flaminius.

How to get to Passignano sul Trasimeno

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Perugia is roughly 28 minutes away by road.

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Deruta

Why visit Deruta

Deruta sits fifteen kilometers south of Perugia, its hill rising above the Tiber on the river's left bank. The walled medieval core, organized around Piazza dei Consoli, occupies the high ground, while the lower town spreads along the old road linking Perugia to Rome.

That road is where the workshops cluster, most of them family businesses running three or four generations deep, and it is also the route that carries traffic five kilometers south to the pilgrimage church, its walls built up over four centuries from votive tiles left by travelers on the same stretch of road. The first documented kilns appear in the archaeological record in the late thirteenth century, and by the early sixteenth the town's workshops had developed the lustro finish that gave Deruta wares their metallic shine, along with the Bella Donna plates that paired painted portraits with flattering banderoles naming the women depicted.

That convent complex, once a working monastery, now holds both the ceramics museum and, next door, the civic gallery with its Perugino and Alunno panels, so the town's religious architecture, its art collection, and its ceramics history sit under the same roof by accident of reuse rather than design. The upper town's churches and museums hold the record of what Deruta made and believed; the lower town's workshops are still making it.

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What to see in Deruta

• Museo Regionale della Ceramica. Holds over 6,000 pieces from medieval to modern, arranged through the convent's old cloister and cells.
• Chiesa di San Francesco. Consecrated 1388 after earthquake reconstruction, Sienese 14th-century frescoes inside, Domenico Alfani Raphael-school panel above an altar.
• Pinacoteca Comunale. Civic gallery with Perugino's Eterno and Saints Romano e Rocco, plus two altarpieces by Niccolò Alunno from the surrounding churches.

How to get to Deruta

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Perugia is roughly 19 minutes away by road.

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Montepulciano

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.

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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

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Perugia is roughly 57 minutes away by road.

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