The best hidden towns you can reach by train that eat well in Lazio

Magliano Sabina

Why visit Magliano Sabina

Magliano Sabina sits at 222 meters on a terrace above the Tiber valley, fifty kilometers north of Rome on the border between Lazio and Umbria. The hill above the river was Sabine ground; the Roman town of Ocriculum, just across in modern Umbria, was the regional anchor.

The medieval centre grew up under the Benedictine abbey of Farfa and passed to the Holy See in the fourteenth century, and the diocesan seat later moved up from the older episcopal site at Vescovio, in the comune's own territory, to the town's upper church. The upper town, walled and gathered around the Palazzo Comunale and the cathedral, occupies the terrace edge; the Vescovio remains lie apart in the surrounding countryside, marking where the diocese first sat before the seat moved uphill into Magliano itself.

From the ridge the ground gives way west to the Tiber and then climbs into Monte Soratte on the far bank, a view that alone earned the town membership in the Borghi più belli d'Italia in 2003. The town's standing, then, rests less on any single monument than on the relation between an old river crossing, an abbey's authority, and a line of sight that has drawn notice since antiquity.

Degli Angeli have been named by a guide.

What to see in Magliano Sabina

• Cattedrale di San Liberatore. The cathedral stands on Piazza Duomo, its stone façade the dominant note of the square and the seat around which the diocese has organized itself since the medieval period.
• Chiesa di San Pietro. Twelfth-century Romanesque church, one of the oldest standing buildings in town, with its original masonry preserved.
• Centro storico. Medieval upper town on the Tiber terrace, with the Palazzo Comunale, the diocesan seat and surviving sections of the village walls.

How to get to Magliano Sabina

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Terni is roughly 41 minutes away by road.

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Castro dei Volsci

Why visit Castro dei Volsci

Castro dei Volsci sits at 385 meters on a ridge above the Sacco river valley, ninety kilometers southeast of Rome and fourteen from Frosinone. The Volsci, an Italic tribe Rome spent two centuries subduing, held this hill before the Latins took it; the name preserves both occupants, Castrum and Volsci, castle and people.

After the year 1000 the village fell to the Papal States and stayed inside that orbit until unification. The valley floor below the ridge holds Roman-era foundations and mosaics, remains of a settlement separate from the hill village above it.

The slopes between the two carry the olive groves that still supply the town's oil. The upper village, where the clock tower and castle ruins stand, is where Nino Manfredi was born in 1921 before the family's path led him to Rome and to postwar cinema; the town he left behind kept its stacked houses, its gates and its position over the valley, and it is that unbroken layout, hill above, groves on the slope, valley floor beneath, that the Borghi più belli d'Italia listing recognizes.

Locanda del Ditirambo have been named by a guide.

What to see in Castro dei Volsci

• Torre dell'Orologio. Medieval clock tower in the upper village. Inside, a permanent exhibition holds Nino Manfredi's films, scripts and personal effects.
• Castello. Ruins of the medieval fortress at the top of the borgo, with a panorama over the Sacco valley and the Monti Ausoni.
• Centro storico. Stacked stone houses, vaulted passages and medieval gates that earned the borgo its Borghi più belli d'Italia membership.

How to get to Castro dei Volsci

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Latina is roughly 71 minutes away by road.

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Arpino

Why visit Arpino

Arpino sits at 450 meters on two hills in the Liri valley, in the Ciociaria region of southern Lazio. The ancient city of Arpinum, on the upper hill now called Civitavecchia, was a Volscian-Samnite stronghold captured by Rome in 305 BC.

The lower hill is the medieval and modern town. Two Roman consuls were born here: Gaius Marius, the military reformer who fought the Cimbri and Teutones, and Marcus Tullius Cicero, the orator and senator killed in 43 BC.

The villa where Cicero was born stood just north, on the Liri, in what is now Isola del Liri. The upper acropolis is ringed by polygonal cyclopean walls of the sixth or fifth century BC, with the Arco a Sesto Acuto, a pointed-arch gate cut into the same stone work.

Arpino is on the Bandiere Arancioni list and on the Cammino di San Benedetto, the long pilgrim route from Norcia to Montecassino.

Mingone, La Perla have been named by a guide.

What to see in Arpino

• Acropoli di Civitavecchia. Pre-Roman upper city on the hill above modern Arpino, surrounded by cyclopean polygonal walls of the sixth or fifth century BC.
• Arco a Sesto Acuto. Pointed-arch gate cut into the cyclopean walls of the acropolis, the only known pre-Roman ogival arch in central Italy.
• Torre di Cicerone. Medieval tower on the acropolis, traditionally linked to Cicero by local memory though built more than a thousand years after his death.

How to get to Arpino

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Latina is roughly 94 minutes away by road.

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Ronciglione

Why visit Ronciglione

The town stands on a tufa spur at 441 meters, five kilometers from the lake, with the Cimini hills and their hazelnut groves closing in around it on every side. The first record of it dates to 1103.

The Prefetti di Vico held it before the Farnese took it as a Duchy, and the sixteenth-century pontiff who granted the town its Carnival did so during that same passage of rule from prefects to dukes. The fortress's towers control the single natural approach to the historic center, so the medieval town and its defenses are really one structure: whoever held the towers held the road in.

Everything built afterward, the cathedral, the contrade, the Carnival itself, sits inside that same defended perimeter. What the RAI title recognized in 2023 was less a single monument than that whole arrangement still intact: a fortified approach, a walled center, and a lake and hills that have not changed shape around it.

Riva Felice have been named by a guide.

What to see in Ronciglione

• Rocca dei Borgia (I Torrioni). Medieval fortress of the Prefects of Vico, twin round towers guarding the only natural approach to the centro storico.
• Duomo dei Santi Pietro e Caterina. Baroque cathedral of 1671, polychrome marble altar, fifteenth-century triptych by a Viterbo painter, wooden statue of San Bartolomeo.
• Lago di Vico. Volcanic lake ringed by the Cimini hills, its waters filling the crater below the level of the town on its spur.

How to get to Ronciglione

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 64 minutes away by road.

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Subiaco

Why visit Subiaco

Subiaco sits at 408 meters along the upper Aniene, seventy-three kilometers east of Rome and forty from Tivoli. Nero built a villa here in the first century, damming the river into artificial lakes known as Sublaqueum, below the lake, and the name outlasted the villa and the emperor both.

The town that grew up here reads in layers going up the valley side: the river and the bridge at the bottom, the abbey partway up the hill, the fortress at the summit, and the cliff sanctuary further out along the cliff face that gave the hermit's cave its shelter, each one built at a different remove from the water and from the town center. What holds these layers together is a single life.

A man who came here as a young man to live alone in a cave gave his name to a monastery down the hill, and centuries later that same monastery's press put the first printed book on Italian soil into circulation. The fortress above answers to a different history, the abbots who ruled here as feudal lords, one of whom fathered a child who became one of the most written-about women of her age.

A river valley that supplied an emperor's pleasure lakes became, without much overlap, the ground where monastic life took its early shape.

Contrada Rapello have been named by a guide.

What to see in Subiaco

• Monastero del Sacro Speco. Built into the cliff face of Monte Taleo, the sanctuary rises in tiers over the cave itself, and the frescoes by Conxolus and the school of Cimabue cover walls that follow the rock rather than a flat plan.
• Abbazia di Santa Scolastica. The only one of Benedict's twelve original monasteries still standing, sixth century in origin; its library holds three hundred manuscripts, including a copy of the Lactantius run off the abbey's own press.
• Rocca Abbaziale (Rocca dei Borgia). Set on the highest ground of the borgo, the fortress was raised by abbot Giovanni V in the twelfth century and later gave Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of the abbot Rodrigo Borgia, a birthplace in 1480.

How to get to Subiaco

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

Everything we know about Subiaco

Castel Gandolfo

Why visit Castel Gandolfo

The town sits at 426 meters on the rim of the Lake Albano crater, twenty-five kilometers southeast of Rome among the Castelli Romani. It stands on the site of Alba Longa, the city Aeneas's son Ascanius is said to have founded.

The lake below was formed by the fusion of two volcanic craters and reaches 170 meters deep. The Villa Barberini stands adjacent to the palace, acquired by Taddeo Barberini in 1631, its gardens running down toward the water.

Pope Francis kept the palace as a museum after 2016; Leo XIV restored it to residential use in June 2025 and resides in the Villa Barberini next door, while the Borgo Laudato Si', created by Francis in 2023, carries ecological education across 55 hectares of the same estate. A town built on legend, given over for a time to public viewing, and returned to private residence: three uses of the same ground, laid one on top of the other without erasing what came before.

Tinello Bistrot, Antico Ristorante Pagnanelli have been named by a guide.

What to see in Castel Gandolfo

• Palazzo Apostolico. The palace Carlo Maderno raised between 1623 and 1626 stood open as a museum from 2016, its rooms given over to display cases and visitors. In June 2025 it returned to residential use, the museum arrangement dismantled to make way for a household again.
• Ville Pontificie e Giardini Barberini. Fifty-five hectares of papal villas and gardens running down to Lake Albano, with the seventeenth-century Villa Barberini at their center.
• Lago Albano. The crater lake sits at 293 meters above sea level and covers five square kilometers, its rim shared between this town and Albano Laziale.

How to get to Castel Gandolfo

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 35 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Castel Gandolfo