The best hill towns on a walking route in Lazio

Acquapendente

Why visit Acquapendente

Acquapendente sits at the northern edge of Lazio, where the Paglia river marks the boundary with Tuscany. The name first appears in a document of Emperor Otto I dated 964, taken from the small waterfalls that drop the river toward the plain.

The town grew up along the pilgrim road that runs north to south through it, and the church at its center, with its Romanesque crypt and sacellum copying the tomb in Jerusalem, gave the settlement its old nickname, the Green Jerusalem. The built-up center holds the basilica and the streets that carry the floral mosaics each May, while outward from it the town's territory stretches to two very different edges: the frazione of Torre Alfina to the north, with its own restored castle and a listing among the country's most beautiful villages, and the forest of the Monte Rufeno reserve beyond that, nearly 3,000 hectares of oak and beech reached by marked trails.

A river border, a pilgrim route, and a nickname earned by a copied tomb: together they describe a town shaped less by what it produced than by what passed through it and what was built to receive those travelers.

What to see in Acquapendente

• Basilica Concattedrale del Santo Sepolcro. Twenty-four columns divide the crypt into nine naves. The sacellum sits carved into the rock at the center, a form pilgrims would have recognized as a copy of the tomb it names.
• Pugnaloni. Panels built from flower petals pressed into wooden frames, carried through the streets by each quarter of the town on the third Sunday of May.
• Castello di Torre Alfina. Neo-Gothic restored fortress in the frazione of Torre Alfina, itself listed among I Borghi più belli d'Italia.

How to get to Acquapendente

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Terni is roughly 96 minutes away by road.

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Capranica

Why visit Capranica

Capranica sits in the Tuscia at the fifty-fifth kilometer of the Via Cassia, on a hill overlooking the Sutri valley between Lake Bracciano and Lake Vico. The Etruscans worked this ground; the medieval borgo grew along the Cassia after the road was rebuilt in the second century BC.

The Anguillara family appeared in 1305 and held the town through most of the fourteenth century. In 1337, under Orso degli Anguillara, Francesco Petrarca stayed here on his way south, the moment local memory still attaches to the place.

Castrovecchio is the oldest quarter, a wedge of stone houses and stepped streets above the Castello degli Anguillara. The town is one of the Italian comuni crossed by the Via Francigena, with a marked stage running north toward Sutri and Vetralla.

Hazelnut groves cover the surrounding slopes; Capranica is a member of the Città della Nocciola network and supplies the Tonda Gentile Romana, the local DOP variety.

What to see in Capranica

• Castello degli Anguillara. Medieval fortress at the head of Castrovecchio, seat of the Anguillara family from 1305 and the place Petrarch stayed in 1337.
• Castrovecchio. Oldest quarter of the town, a wedge of stone houses and stepped streets rising above the Cassia toward the castle.
• Chiesa di San Francesco. Fourteenth-century Franciscan church on the edge of Castrovecchio, with fresco fragments and Anguillara family tombs.

How to get to Capranica

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 72 minutes away by road.

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Sutri

Why visit Sutri

Sutri sits at 291 meters on a narrow tuff spur, fifty kilometers north of Rome on the old road linking the two. The Etruscans held it before the Romans took it in the fourth century BC, and it was among the colonies that refused further military contributions to Rome during the Second Punic War in 209 BC.

The rock-cut monuments that define the town, the arena, the temple turned sanctuary, the chamber tombs, all come from the same tuff spur the town is built on, so the stone that gives Sutri its ground is also what its Etruscan and Roman residents carved into. The high ground above, where the eighteenth-century villa and its gardens sit, looks down over that older excavated town rather than sitting apart from it.

Local tradition ties the town's beans to Charlemagne, who passed through and was supposedly relieved of an attack of gout by Sutri's variety. What the place adds up to is a settlement where the town and its excavation are the same rock: nothing was built so much as removed.

What to see in Sutri

• Anfiteatro Romano. Elliptical amphitheater about forty-nine by forty meters, carved directly out of the tuff rock rather than built on it.
• Mithraeum / Madonna del Parto. Roman temple to Mithras hewn into the tuff and reused as a Marian sanctuary, accessed through the medieval rock-cut church.
• Necropoli rupestre. Etruscan necropolis with dozens of rock-cut chamber tombs in the cliff face along the Via Cassia.

How to get to Sutri

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Roma is roughly 57 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.

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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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.

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.

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Sermoneta

Why visit Sermoneta

Sermoneta sits at 257 meters on a spur of the Monti Lepini, above what was once the Pontine Marshes and is now reclaimed plain. The Annibaldi held the site in the 13th century until 1297, when Pietro Caetani, nephew of Pope Boniface VIII, bought it and made it the seat of one of the great medieval Roman families.

The walled village climbs from the Porta Annibaldi up through narrow lanes to the fortress at its head, the two parts of the town, lower gate and upper stronghold, built as one continuous piece of Caetani-era stone. Below, in the valley, the family later turned an abandoned settlement into a garden, so the plain that emptied of people in the 17th century became, in the 20th, a cultivated ruin looked after by the same family that once ruled the hill above it.

The town on the spur and the garden in the plain are the same story told at two elevations: a family that built to hold ground in the medieval centuries, then returned centuries later to plant over what the land had reclaimed.

What to see in Sermoneta

• Castello Caetani. The Maschio tower stands beside the smaller Maschietto, and the Camere Pinte hold their frescoes from the 1470s. Charles V lodged here in April 1536 with 1,000 knights and 4,000 infantry.
• Giardino di Ninfa. The garden grows over stone that was once a working medieval town, abandoned in the 17th century after malaria emptied the plain; walls and a former church line survive among the planting.
• Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Romanesque collegiate church from the 13th century inside the walls, with a 14th-century panel of the Madonna by Benozzo Gozzoli.

How to get to Sermoneta

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 23 minutes away by road.

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Isola del Liri

Why visit Isola del Liri

Isola del Liri is built on an actual island, where the Liri river splits into two arms and the two arms fall over a limestone shelf into the lower valley. The Cascata Grande is 27 meters high and lands inside the historic center, fifty meters from the Castello Boncompagni-Viscogliosi, the fortified palace above it.

The second fall, Cascata del Valcatoio, is partly diverted for hydropower. From the 19th century the river ran the paper mills, felt mills and wool mills that gave the town the name Manchester of Italy: the Fibreno-Lefebvre mill exported to North America.

The paper industry collapsed in the late 20th century. The town responded with the Liri Blues Festival, started in 1988 by a local businessman, Luciano Duro, to draw attention back to a place that had lost its trade; it became one of Europe's longer-running free blues festivals.

The Cammino di San Benedetto walking route passes through.

What to see in Isola del Liri

• Cascata Grande. 27-meter waterfall in the center of town, the Liri river dropping over a limestone shelf next to the castle.
• Cascata del Valcatoio. Second urban waterfall on the right arm of the Liri, partially diverted for hydroelectric production.
• Castello Boncompagni-Viscogliosi. Fortified palace from the 14th century above the Cascata Grande, residence of the Boncompagni-Ludovisi from the 16th century.

How to get to Isola del Liri

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 80 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Isola del Liri

Montefiascone

Why visit Montefiascone

The town sits on the southeastern rim of a volcanic crater, about a hundred kilometers north of Rome, with the fortress at its highest point and the rest of the settlement built down the slope from there. The basilica stands just outside the walls at the lower end of that slope, separate enough from the fortress and the cathedral that the three read as three distinct centers of the town rather than one monument with satellites.

The wine takes its name from the same twelfth-century legend that put a German bishop's prelate on the road marking inn doors, and that bishop is the one buried in the basilica below, which ties the town's best-known export to a specific grave rather than to a floating story. The pilgrim route passes through on its way between Bolsena and Viterbo, so the hill that holds a papal summer residence and a wine legend was also, and still is, a stop on a much longer walk to Rome.

What the place adds up to is a small hill town where a fortress, a two-story church, and a road to somewhere else all sit within a short walk of one another, each one a different kind of stop on the same hill.

What to see in Montefiascone

• Rocca dei Papi. The fortress walls enclose the summit; the tower stair is narrow and gives out onto the panorama at once, the water filling the whole crater rim below.
• Basilica di San Flaviano. Two churches stacked on each other, the lower nave older and darker, the upper one built two centuries later and open to more light. The frescoes are original to the walls, not restored copies, and the German bishop Johannes Defuk is buried here.
• Cattedrale di Santa Margherita. The octagonal dome is 27 meters across, third largest in Italy by base diameter, finished in the late sixteenth century. It dominates the town's roofline the way the fortress dominates its summit.

How to get to Montefiascone

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 75 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Montefiascone