The 7 best hidden towns worth staying overnight in Trentino-Alto Adige

1. Corvara in Badia

Best for a small town. 1,446 people live here.

1 h 15 min from Bolzano · homes €4,200 to €8,300 a m² in the center · 1,446 people

Why visit Corvara in Badia

Corvara sits at 1,568 meters in a wide basin at the head of the Val Badia, below the rock spire of the Sassongher and inside the Dolomites UNESCO area. Ladin is the everyday language: in the 2024 census 87 percent of residents named it as their first tongue, with Italian and German distant second and third.

The settlement was a scattered group of farms until tourism arrived in the early twentieth century, and Corvara is considered the birthplace of organized Alpine tourism in the Val Badia. The village is one of four bases on the Sellaronda, the forty-kilometre ski circuit that loops the Sella massif through Corvara, Arabba, Canazei and Selva di Val Gardena on a single lift pass.

Above the village, the Pralongià plateau opens a long view to the Marmolada glacier. The Gran Risa piste at the next hamlet of La Villa hosts the men's giant slalom on the World Cup tour each December.

The catch: January nights average 10 degrees below zero.

What to see in Corvara in Badia

• Chiesa di Santa Caterina. Late Gothic church first documented in 1347 and consecrated to Saint Catherine in 1452, holding the only well-preserved winged altar in Val Badia, dated 1520.
• Sassongher. Rock peak at 2,665 meters above the village, the signature silhouette of Corvara and a classic via ferrata climb on the eastern flank.
• Altopiano di Pralongià. Grassy plateau above the village reached by cable car, with open views to the Marmolada glacier and the surrounding Dolomite groups.

How to get to Corvara in Badia

Bolzano is about 1 h 15 min away by road.

Everything we know about Corvara in Badia

2. San Pancrazio

50 min from Bolzano · homes €2,000 to €2,500 a m² in the center · 1,549 people

Why visit San Pancrazio

San Pancrazio (St. Pankraz in German) sits at 736 meters at the mouth of the Ultental (Val d'Ultimo in Italian), one of the most isolated alpine side-valleys of the Adige basin in South Tyrol. San Pancrazio is one of the valley's two comuni, with Ultimo further up; 92% of residents speak German as their first language, and the local economy is still organized around alpine pasturing on the south-facing slopes of the Maddalena group and the Ortles range to the south-west.

The parish church of San Pancrazio Martire was rebuilt in 1796 in late-Baroque style after fire, with the tall narrow Tyrolean bell tower visible from the valley road. The real draw is the Ultental itself: the protected Larici Millenari (Lahnerlärchen) above San Pancrazio include several larches over 800 years old, some of the oldest documented in Europe, and the Lahner Säge open-air sawmill museum a few kilometers up the valley preserves the 17th-century water-powered timber processing that built the Tyrolean church roofs.

The Stelvio National Park boundary passes just south of the village.

The catch: January nights average 5 degrees below zero.

What to see in San Pancrazio

• Larici Millenari di San Gertrude (Lahnerlärchen). Protected stand of larches above San Pancrazio, several documented at over 800 years old, some of the oldest verified larches in Europe. A signed circular walking trail.
• Chiesa di San Pancrazio Martire (St. Pankraz). Late-Baroque parish church rebuilt 1796 after a fire, with the tall Tyrolean bell tower that anchors the village skyline.
• Lahner Säge: open-air sawmill museum. 17th-century water-powered sawmill a few kilometers up the Ultental, preserved as an open-air museum demonstrating the Tyrolean timber processing that built the region's church roofs.

How to get to San Pancrazio

Bolzano is about 50 min away by road.

Everything we know about San Pancrazio

3. Pinzolo

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

1 h 2 min from Trento · homes €3,200 to €4,000 a m² in the center · 3,088 people

Why visit Pinzolo

Val Rendena runs the length of the valley floor, separating the granite of the Adamello-Presanella to the west from the Dolomites to the east, and Pinzolo sits at its center at 770 meters. The settlement is documented from 1211 as Penzollo, a medieval community of farmers and pastoralists that kept a degree of independence from the D'Arco counts through its own village assembly, the Università.

Most of the municipal territory now falls inside the Adamello-Brenta Nature Park, the largest protected area in Trentino, which places both mountain ranges within the same administrative boundary as the town itself. Up the valley, the frazione of Madonna di Campiglio grew from a travelers' hospice into a resort, and the two settlements are now linked by gondola as well as by governance, the older farming village at the valley floor and the younger resort on the slopes above it.

Pinzolo became a ski town in the second half of the twentieth century, and the cable car climbing from its center to 2,100 meters is the physical expression of that link, carrying the town's growth up toward the peaks that have always framed it.

What to see in Pinzolo

• Chiesa di San Vigilio. The church stands above the village. Its painted procession of eighteen skeleton pairs leads pope, emperor, king, beggar and child in a single line across the exterior wall, the fresco surviving in near-complete condition.
• Chiesa di Santo Stefano. Cemetery church on the edge of the village, frescoed inside and outside by the Baschenis painters with another Dance of Death cycle and scenes of saints.
• Parco Naturale Adamello-Brenta. Largest protected area in Trentino, covering most of the Pinzolo territory and including the Brenta Dolomites and the Adamello-Presanella glaciers.

How to get to Pinzolo

Trento is about 1 h 2 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pinzolo

4. Innichen

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

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

5. Toblach

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

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

6. St. Ulrich

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

43 min from Bolzano · homes €5,400 to €9,500 a m² in the center · 4,724 people

Why visit St. Ulrich

The valley climbs east from the Eisack toward the Sella and the Sassolungo, and the town sits at its middle point. Almost all residents speak Ladin at home, and signage runs trilingual in Ladin, German and Italian.

Three lifts leave the village in three directions: one to the northwest onto a plateau, one north onto a long ridge below the Odle, and one south onto a high meadow that forms the valley's southern edge. The museum inside the Cësa di Ladins holds the record of the valley's carving tradition alongside fossils from the surrounding peaks and material on Luis Trenker, the mountaineer-actor-director who came from here.

The layout, a village hemmed by three lifts and named for the saint of its own parish church, reads as a place organized entirely around the ground it sits on: craft below, peaks and plateaus in every direction above.

The catch: January nights average 6 degrees below zero.

What to see in St. Ulrich

• Parish church (St. Ulrich/San Udalrico). Neoclassical church with Baroque elements, rebuilt in the late 18th century, dedicated to the Epiphany and to St. Ulrich, the patron saint who gives the town its German name.
• Museum Gherdëina. Local-heritage museum inside the Cësa di Ladins documenting four centuries of woodcarving, wooden toys, sacred sculpture, Dolomite fossils and the Trenker family archive.
• Seceda. Long limestone ridge reached by cable car from the village, with the Odle/Geisler peaks rising sharply to the north and high meadows dropping toward the valley.

How to get to St. Ulrich

Bolzano is about 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about St. Ulrich

7. Kastelruth

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

44 min from Bolzano · homes €3,000 to €5,000 a m² in the center · 7,053 people

Why visit Kastelruth

Castelrotto, in German Kastelruth and in Ladin Ciastel, sits at 1,060 meters on a shelf below the Sciliar, twenty kilometers northeast of Bolzano. The commune's territory rises from 720 meters at San Vigilio to over 2,400 meters on the Sciliar massif, with the Alpe di Siusi reached from within that territory.

The name first appears in the tenth century and goes back to the Castellum Ruptum, a destroyed castle on the Calvary hill above the village, so the hill above the square and the name on the map are the same story told twice. Of around 6,500 residents, 82 per cent speak German as their first language, 15 per cent Ladin and 3 per cent Italian.

That balance, and the position on a shelf between the valley floor and the high meadow above it, is what gives the village its Tyrolean character rather than an Italian one: a settlement whose center, church tower, and surrounding pasture all sit within sight of each other, with the mountain doing most of the work of orientation.

The catch: January nights average 7 degrees below zero.

What to see in Kastelruth

• Campanile della Parrocchiale. Standing apart from the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul, the tower is visible from the surrounding pastures long before the village itself comes into view.
• Chiesa Parrocchiale dei Santi Pietro e Paolo. Neoclassical church of 1846-49 beside the detached tower, on the site of a parish recorded since about 1191.
• Alpe di Siusi/Seiser Alm. Reached by cable car from Siusi, the meadow opens out with the Sciliar and Sassolungo on either side, a scale that is hard to read from photographs alone.

How to get to Kastelruth

Bolzano is about 44 min away by road.

Everything we know about Kastelruth