The best hill towns with a food festival in Lazio
Lazio away from the sea is a region of volcanic rock and standing water, of tufo cliffs the colour of wet sand, chestnut woods above the Cimini hills and olive terraces sloping towards the Sabina. The towns are built from the stone they sit on, which is why so many of them look grown rather than constructed. Autumn is the season that matters, when the sagre begin and a piazza is given over to one thing: hazelnuts roasted in drums, chestnuts, the local white poured from demijohns, bean soups cooked in copper pots the size of a bathtub. Spring brings the artichoke and the broad bean, and the tables come out again.
Almost everyone who comes to Lazio spends their days in Rome, and reasonably so, then makes one trip out to Tivoli for the fountains at Villa d'Este and the ruins of Hadrian's Villa. The coaches arrive early, the ticket queues form by mid-morning, and the town beyond the gardens is largely walked past. It is a fine day out and a crowded one, and it tells you almost nothing about how people in this region actually eat.
The same hills carry on past Tivoli, north into the Tuscia and south towards Ciociaria, and the food festivals carry on with them. These are smaller places, some on the rim of a crater lake, some looking across the Sacco valley, each holding a recurring sagra built around a single local ingredient and cooked by the people who grow it. Fewer visitors make the drive, which is mostly a matter of the trains not going there.
Of the 60 communes we have mapped in Lazio, 8 qualify as hill towns with a food festival: each is an inland hill settlement, and each holds a recurring food festival built around one local ingredient. The smallest, Casperia, has 1,178 residents.
Elsewhere in the catalogue: The best towns with a food festival that you can reach by train in Lazio and The best hill towns inside a nature park in Lazio.
Casperia
Why visit Casperia
Casperia sits at 397 meters on the western slope of the Monti Sabini, fifty kilometers northeast of Rome. Its two gates face opposite directions on the hillside, one toward the lower road on the west, the other toward the valley on the east, and both feed into the same climbing street pattern that rings the hill in concentric bands up to the church at the summit.
No vehicles pass the gates, so the interior keeps its medieval scale intact, lane by lane, without the intrusions that have altered plenty of comparable towns. Below the walls the slope opens into olive country, part of a protected-origin appellation, in the localities of Paranzano, Santa Maria in Legarano and San Vito.
The relationship between the two levels, hilltop settlement above and working groves below, is the shape of the place: a defended village that never spread past its walls, sitting over land that has been worked continuously and given a name and a boundary of its own.
What to see in Casperia
- Centro storico. Concentric lanes climb from the gates to the parish church at the summit, laid out with no space for vehicles, a compact plan that reads clearly from any of the approaches below.
- Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista. Parish church on the highest point of the village, baroque interior on medieval foundations, with works by Vincenzo Manenti.
- Porta Romana. Western gate of the wall circuit, the main entry point on foot from the lower road.
How to get to Casperia
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Terni is roughly 43 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the best months in the Sabina hills. The olive harvest runs from mid-October into November; the new oil is pressed in the cooperatives around the village and the town fills on autumn weekends for tastings. July and August are hot in the lower valley; the village at 397 meters is several degrees cooler and the lanes hold shade. Sagra dei Stringozzi Aspresi falls in July.
Oriolo Romano
Why visit Oriolo Romano
Oriolo Romano sits at 420 meters in the Sabatini hills, between Lake Bracciano and the volcanic Cimini, not far from the old Via Clodia. The village is unusually new for the Tuscia: in 1560 the Orsini family ceded a wooded fief to the nobleman Giorgio Santacroce, who began clearing the forest and founded a planned agricultural settlement.
The first inhabitants were farmers, shepherds and woodcutters drawn from Tuscany and Umbria, so the local accent kept Umbrian inflections for generations. The palace at the center of the village gave the settlement its shape, with the parish church and the main square arranged around it as the plan intended.
The forest that once covered the whole fief survives now at the margins, an exceptionally low-altitude stand for an Apennine beech wood, while hazelnut groves have taken over the lower slopes that were cleared for farming. The village, in effect, is the cleared half of a wooded fief, its cultivated ring still framed by the wood the Santacroce family left standing.
What to see in Oriolo Romano
- Palazzo Altieri. Sixteenth-century palace enlarged in 1674 under Pope Clement X, with Old Testament frescoes and painted views of the Altieri fiefs.
- Faggeta di Monte Raschio. Primeval beech forest of about eighty hectares between 400 and 550 meters, UNESCO World Heritage since 2017.
- Piazza Umberto I. Central square of the 1560 plan, anchored by the palace and the parish Chiesa di Sant'Anna at the head of the village.
How to get to Oriolo Romano
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 75 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months for the beech forest, when the canopy is full and the trails on Monte Raschio are at their cleanest. The exceptionally low altitude of the faggeta means autumn color arrives earlier and lasts longer than in higher Apennine beech woods. July and August push the lower hills into the low thirties; the forest holds shade and stays five or six degrees cooler than the surrounding farmland. Oriolo Romano Porcini Mushroom Festival falls in September.
Canale Monterano
Why visit Canale Monterano
Canale Monterano sits at 376 meters on a tuff hill forty-five kilometers northwest of Rome, between the Bracciano basin and the Tolfa hills. The inhabited town is small, four thousand residents, built around a working bakery tradition.
Two kilometers away, on a separate tuff bluff above the confluence of the Mignone and Bicione rivers, is the reason most people make the trip: the ghost town, set on the far side of a valley the living town does not touch. The relationship between the two places is one of distance and separation rather than continuity.
Canale Monterano went on being a town; the settlement on the bluff did not, and the two kilometers between them mark the difference between a place that was rebuilt after the fire and one that never was. What is left on the bluff is masonry with the roofs and interiors gone, watched over from its highest point by the palace facade, with the fountain still running below in an otherwise empty piazza.
The regional reserve now holds the whole valley, ruin and river system together, so that the abandoned village survives inside protected land rather than beside a working one.
What to see in Canale Monterano
- Ruderi di Monterano. Ghost town two kilometers from Canale, burned by French Republican troops in 1799, never rebuilt; now the centerpiece of the regional reserve.
- Chiesa e Convento di San Bonaventura. Roofless, facing an open sky where the roof beams once sat. The façade and convent block still stand at the edge of the ruined village, built for the Altieri family by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
- Fontana Ottagonale del Leone. Still flowing through the stone lion's mouth in the middle of an otherwise empty piazza, the only thing in the ghost town that still functions as built.
How to get to Canale Monterano
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Roma is roughly 70 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the best months for the reserve. The trail from the parking lot to the ruins is exposed, and spring and autumn keep the temperatures comfortable. July and August push past thirty degrees on the tuff plateau, and the open ruins offer no shade after eleven in the morning; early-morning visits are the workaround. Sagra del Lombrichello a Canale Monterano falls in July.
Caprarola
Why visit Caprarola
Caprarola stands at about 510 meters on the volcanic slopes of the Cimini, six kilometers east of Lago di Vico. The town is built on a single axis that climbs from the lower village to the Villa Farnese, the pentagonal Renaissance palace that organises everything below it.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger designed the original fortress in 1530; after Sangallo's death the work was suspended, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger reassigned it to Vignola in 1559. Vignola kept the pentagonal plan but turned it from a fortress into a Mannerist residence, with a circular colonnaded courtyard at its center, a scala regia spiraling between floors and the fresco cycles of the Zuccari brothers.
The plan was the model later copied for the Pentagon in Washington. Behind the villa, the Giardini Farnese climb into the chestnut and beech woods of the Cimini.
Caprarola is part of the Città della Nocciola and Città del Castagno networks, a recognition of the volcanic soils that produce both.
What to see in Caprarola
- Villa Farnese. Pentagonal Mannerist palace by Vignola, built 1559-1573 on Sangallo's earlier fortress plan, with a circular colonnaded courtyard.
- Giardini Farnese. Sixteenth-century formal garden and casino di caccia behind the villa, climbing into the chestnut woods of the Cimini.
- Lago di Vico. Volcanic crater lake at 510 meters, one of the highest of the major Italian lakes, shared with Ronciglione.
How to get to Caprarola
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Terni is roughly 67 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months for the villa and the Cimini woods, when the chestnut canopy holds shade and Lago di Vico is at its clearest. July and August push the lower town into the low thirties; the high ceilings of the Villa Farnese keep visitors cool through the heat. The hazelnut harvest runs late August and September, the chestnut harvest follows in October, and both fill the surrounding sagre. Hazelnut Festival falls in August.
Vitorchiano
Why visit Vitorchiano
Vitorchiano sits at 285 meters on a single bank of peperino. Two ravines flank the town and meet at the Vezza torrent below, which is why the old center reads as an island of dark stone with the land falling away on both sides.
The quarries below the town are still working, and Vitorchiano peperino now ships to Canada, Japan and the Middle East, so the same rock that holds up the walls and staircases overhead also travels out from underneath the town in the other direction. The statue on the ridge was carved from a single block of that local stone by sculptors who came from the other side of the world to work it, which is its own kind of trade: peperino leaving Vitorchiano to be known abroad, and a foreign hand arriving to shape what stayed.
Above the rooftops, the Belvedere gives the wider frame the streets below cannot, the Cimini hills and the Tiber valley spread out past the ravine. Vitorchiano holds three institutional signals at once: Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione TCI, Città della Nocciola.
A small town, then, defined less by any one of its parts than by how completely the stone underneath it accounts for all of them.
What to see in Vitorchiano
- Centro storico in peperino. Medieval old town cut from a single volcanic boulder, walls and houses built in dark Vitorchiano peperino quarried below.
- Moai di Vitorchiano. Six-meter peperino statue carved in 1990 by eleven sculptors of the Atan family from Easter Island, the only true Moai outside Rapa Nui.
- Belvedere. Cliff-edge terrace at the eastern end of the borgo, view across the Vezza ravine to the Cimini hills and the Tiber valley.
How to get to Vitorchiano
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 53 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June brings the Cimini hills into green and Vitorchiano into clear light, the peperino dark against new leaves. September and October are the harvest months for hazelnuts and the calmest period in the borgo. July and August touch the mid-thirties; the centro storico empties between two and five in the afternoon. Sagra del Cavatello falls in July.
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.
The re-enactment here is Il Gonfalone, usually held across July and August.
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.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the strong months. Spring brings green hills along the Liri and clear views from the acropolis; autumn is dry and gold. July and August push past thirty degrees in the valley, although Arpino's 450-meter position offers some relief in the upper town. Il Gonfalone falls in July.
Anagni
Why visit Anagni
Anagni sits on a hilltop at 424 meters in Ciociaria, fifty-five kilometers southeast of Rome, looking over the Sacco valley and the Hernici mountains. It is one of four communes called the Città dei Papi, the others being Segni, Ferentino, and Veroli; four medieval popes were born here, Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and a fourth who would later be attacked in his own palace.
Agents of Philip IV of France, acting on his orders, stormed that palace on the hill and physically assaulted the reigning pope inside it. The centralized medieval papacy died with him within the month, and within five years the papal court had moved to Avignon.
The town's medieval fabric runs along Via Vittorio Emanuele, where the communal loggia, a frescoed church, and a house layered with nineteenth-century inscriptions sit within walking distance of each other on the same climb up from the lower town to the cathedral above. A single event inside a single palace on this hill is the reason the town's name outgrew its size: four popes were born here, but it is one pope's injury, not birth, that historians still date the end of an era to.
What to see in Anagni
- Cattedrale di Santa Maria. Romanesque cathedral on the highest point of the hill, with Gothic additions, a campanile, and a Cosmati pavement underfoot.
- Cripta di San Magno. The crypt beneath the cathedral floor, walls covered edge to edge in painting, dim enough that the colors need a moment to settle into view.
- Palazzo di Bonifacio VIII. The papal palace where Sciarra Colonna struck Boniface VIII during the Outrage of Anagni, its thirteenth-century rooms still standing on the hill.
How to get to Anagni
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 55 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the strong months. The hilltop position keeps Anagni cooler than the Sacco valley below, and the cathedral and crypt are best seen in the soft light of spring and autumn. July and August push past thirty-two degrees and the centro storico empties between two and five in the afternoon. Sagra dei Maltagliati falls in July.
Velletri
Why visit Velletri
The town sits at 332 meters, thirty-five kilometers from Rome, on the southeastern rim of a volcanic ring of craters and lakes. Before it was a papal possession and a diocesan seat, it was a Volscian stronghold, and before that the home ground of the Octavii, the paternal family of the man who became Augustus: Suetonius records a street here called Octavian and an altar consecrated by an Octavius, and the future emperor passed his childhood in the town under its old name, Velitrae.
That layering, Volscian settlement, imperial family seat, papal diocese, is what the center still shows once the war is accounted for: an army broke through a German defensive line here in May 1944, and much of the town was destroyed in the process. What stands now above the old piazza and around the rebuilt town hall is largely reconstruction fitted around what survived, with a wine trade going back to the volcanic soil that predates all of it.
A town whose name changed twice, whose family produced an emperor, and whose center was rebuilt from a battle line, but whose vineyards on the same slopes never stopped being the constant.
What to see in Velletri
- Torre del Trivio. 50-meter Romanesque bell tower from the 14th century, the only structure to come through the 1944 bombing intact, still the shape by which the town is recognized from a distance.
- Palazzo Comunale. Renaissance town hall designed by Giacomo Della Porta, rebuilt after wartime damage, facing the piazza named for the emperor born to the town.
- Cattedrale di San Clemente. Cathedral seat of the suburbicarian Diocese of Velletri-Segni, a title held today by the Dean of the College of Cardinals.
How to get to Velletri
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 35 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June brings the Alban Hills at their greenest, vineyards in leaf, and mild evenings on the piazzas. September and October are the wine months: the Festa dell'Uva, one of the oldest grape festivals in Italy, runs in the first week of September. July and August are hot in the lower town and at their best after sunset, when the volcanic slopes hold the breeze. Calici sotto le stelle falls in August.
More from Anywhere Italy
- The best towns with a food festival that you can reach by train in Lazio
The best hill towns inside a nature park in Lazio
The 8 best hill towns with a serious restaurant in Lazio
The best towns known for what they grow within 75 minutes of Rome
The 6 best wine towns in Lazio- The 8 best hidden hill towns within 90 minutes of Roma