The best hill towns you can reach by train in Emilia-Romagna

Canossa

Why visit Canossa

Canossa sits on the Apennine slope thirty kilometers south of Parma and twenty-five southwest of Reggio Emilia, at 219 meters at the seat in Ciano d'Enza. The commune is named for the ruined fortress on a white limestone outcrop eight kilometers east, built before 950 by Adalbert Atto of Lucca and held by Matilde di Canossa until her death in 1115.

The fortress was destroyed by Reggio Emilia in 1255. The commune was itself called Ciano d'Enza until 1992, when it took the older name back, so the seat in the valley and the ruin on the hill now share one name across two places.

Vineyards on the surrounding slopes produce Lambrusco and the Spergola white grape, and the path between Ciano and the castle ruin remains the Sentiero Matilde, the same climb that once carried Henry IV to the gate where Gregory VII made him wait. A commune this small holds an outsized memory: a valley seat, a demolished hilltop stronghold, and a name discarded and then reclaimed, all turning on three days that happened at the top of the path.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Canossa

• Castello di Canossa. Fortress on a white sandstone outcrop, its walls reduced to a ruin standing over the valley since the demolition of 1255. The site now houses the Museo Nazionale Naborre Campanini.
• Castello di Rossena. Best-preserved of the Matildic castles, built in the tenth century on volcanic rock to guard the western approach to the ruin on the neighboring hill.
• Torre di Rossenella. Square watchtower a kilometer from Rossena, built on a separate basalt pinnacle as a forward observation post for the defensive system below.

How to get to Canossa

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Reggio Emilia is roughly 43 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Canossa

Borgo Val di Taro

Why visit Borgo Val di Taro

Borgo Val di Taro sits at 411 meters in the upper Taro valley, sixty-three kilometers southwest of Parma at the point where the province meets Liguria and Tuscany on the Apennine ridge. The town was a Roman waystation, then a possession of the Bobbio abbey, then of the Landi and Doria-Landi families through the medieval centuries.

Modern Borgotaro built itself around the porcini trade: the Boletus mushrooms gathered in the surrounding chestnut woods were already famous in the nineteenth century, exported by emigrants to the Americas, and in 1996 the European Union granted the Fungo di Borgotaro Protected Geographical Indication status, the first European recognition for a wild mushroom. The Consorzio per la Tutela del Porcino di Borgotaro was founded the same year.

The Cittaslow movement admitted the town in the 2000s. The September Fiera del Fungo di Borgotaro is the calendar event; population has dropped under seven thousand but the porcini trade still anchors the local economy.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Borgo Val di Taro

• Centro storico. Medieval town center along the Taro, with the Palazzo Tardiani, the Piazza Manara, and the porticos lining the old market street.
• Chiesa di Sant'Antonino. Sixteenth-century parish church with a Baroque interior, holding a fifteenth-century crucifix and a wooden image of the Madonna del Carmelo.
• Palazzo Tardiani. Eighteenth-century palace on the main street, now housing the municipal library and the cultural offices.

How to get to Borgo Val di Taro

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Parma is roughly 67 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Borgo Val di Taro

Brisighella

Why visit Brisighella

Brisighella sits in the Lamone valley at 115 meters, forty-five kilometers southeast of Bologna, on the Apennine slope where Romagna meets the gypsum vein the UNESCO list added in 2023. Three selenite hills rise above the rooftops, each carrying a building: the Rocca Manfrediana, built in 1310 by Francesco Manfredi and reinforced by the Venetians after 1503; the Torre dell'Orologio, rebuilt in 1850 with a six-hour dial instead of twelve; and the Santuario del Monticino above the town.

The Via degli Asini runs through the centro storico as a covered elevated street, originally a fourteenth-century patrol walkway, later excavated into stables for the donkeys that hauled gypsum down from the quarries. The Nostrana di Brisighella olive, grown on the same hills, makes the Brisighello DOP oil that has carried European protection since 1996.

The town holds four institutional signals at once: Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, Cittaslow, Città dell'Olio.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Brisighella

• Rocca Manfrediana. Hilltop fortress begun in 1310 by Francesco Manfredi of Faenza, reinforced by Astorgio II in the 1460s and held by Venice after 1503.
• Torre dell'Orologio. Clock tower rebuilt in 1850 on an earlier defensive structure, with a dial that marks six hours rather than the usual twelve.
• Santuario del Monticino. Eighteenth-century sanctuary on the third selenite hill, overlooking the town and the Lamone valley below.

How to get to Brisighella

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Forlì is roughly 55 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Brisighella

Longiano

Why visit Longiano

Longiano sits at 179 meters on the first hill line between Cesena and Rimini, eleven kilometers inland from Cesenatico and within sight of the Adriatic. The town shifted from the plain to the hill in the seventh and eighth centuries, when the local population moved up to escape Lombard raids, and the settlement that resulted is the hilltop borgo still walled today, with the castle at its center and the theater just below it.

Longiano passed to the Church in 1581 and stayed under papal rule until unification, before the castle came to the commune in 1989. The sanctuary stands apart from this hilltop cluster, built around its painted crucifix and held by Franciscan presence for over seven centuries, a separate thread of the town's history running alongside the Malatesta line and the civic one.

What ties the parts together is the hill itself: a defensive move made in the seventh and eighth centuries left Longiano with a compact center where a former ruling family's fortress, a nineteenth-century theater and a walled medieval borgo all sit within reach of each other, while the sanctuary's much older devotional history runs on its own separate track nearby.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Longiano

• Castello Malatestiano. Fortified hilltop seat of the Malatesta of Rimini, later passing to the Church and then the commune. Its rooms now hold the Fondazione Tito Balestra, so the walls that once housed a ruling family now hold paintings, drawings and sculpture.
• Teatro Petrella. Sits just below the castle. Restored in 1986, it is known today for its acoustics inside the horseshoe-shaped hall.
• Santuario del Santissimo Crocifisso. Franciscan sanctuary built around a thirteenth-century painted crucifix on oak panel, with continuous Franciscan presence for over seven centuries.

How to get to Longiano

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Rimini is roughly 30 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Longiano

Verucchio

Why visit Verucchio

Verucchio sits on a 330-meter spur over the lower Marecchia valley, eighteen kilometers from Rimini and within sight of the Adriatic plain. A Villanovan settlement occupied this ridge from the twelfth to the seventh century BC and left a necropolis whose chamber tombs, amber, bronze, and worked wood form the Museo Civico Archeologico collection now housed in the former Augustinian convent.

The town is also the home ground of the Malatesta, named for Malatesta da Verucchio, founder of the lordship that would rule Rimini, Cesena, Pesaro, Fano and Fossombrone for two centuries; his Rocca Malatestiana, also called Castel del Sasso, is one of the largest and best-preserved Malatesta fortifications and his birthplace. A second fortress, the Rocca del Passerello, holds the lower end of the ridge.

The commune extends to the frazione of Villa Verucchio, where the cypress planted by Saint Francis of Assisi during a 1213 visit still grows in the convent cloister.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Verucchio

• Rocca Malatestiana. Twelfth-to-sixteenth-century fortress on the highest point of the ridge, birthplace of Malatesta da Verucchio and one of the largest Malatesta fortifications surviving.
• Museo Civico Archeologico. Villanovan archaeology museum in the former Augustinian convent, holding amber jewellery, bronze armour and a wooden throne from the seventh-century BC necropolis.
• Rocca del Passerello. Second Malatesta fortress at the lower end of the ridge, smaller than the Sasso but built into the same defensive system in the fourteenth century.

How to get to Verucchio

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Rimini is roughly 27 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Verucchio

Castelvetro di Modena

Why visit Castelvetro di Modena

Castelvetro di Modena sits on a hill at 152 meters, eighteen kilometers southeast of Modena and at the northern edge of the Apennine foothills. The medieval centro storico rises around the Piazza Roma, paved in alternating white and black stones that earned it the name Piazza della Dama, the checkerboard piazza, framed by the four surviving towers of the old castle.

The Grasparossa grape grows on the clay slopes around the town, the sandy soil and the south-facing aspect producing the deepest, most tannic of the three main Lambruschi; Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro received DOC status in 1970. Above the piazza, the Palazzo Rinaldi houses the Museo del Vino and the Museo dell'Aceto Balsamico, the second tracing the same Modenese tradition that nearby Spilamberto codifies.

The municipality holds three institutional signals: Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, Città del Vino. The Sagra dell'Uva e del Lambrusco runs the last weekend of September, when the streets fill with the chess players from the surrounding Lambrusco towns dressed as living pieces on the piazza.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Castelvetro di Modena

• Piazza Roma. Checkerboard piazza paved in alternating white and black stones, framed by the four surviving towers of the medieval castle.
• Castello di Levizzano Rangone. Tenth-century fortified frazione four kilometers north, with a tower built in the 990s and a fully preserved medieval village.
• Museo del Vino. Wine museum inside the Palazzo Rinaldi, tracing the Grasparossa production cycle and the DOC zone established in 1970.

How to get to Castelvetro di Modena

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

Everything we know about Castelvetro di Modena

Sasso Marconi

Why visit Sasso Marconi

The Setta and Reno rivers meet below the rock that gives the town its name, at the point where the pre-Apennine hills begin their climb south of Bologna. The Sasso della Glosina dominates the bend, a Pliocene formation old enough to have shaped how the crossing below it was used long before the valley took its modern name.

The town itself was called Sasso Bolognese until 1938, when it was renamed for the family whose estate lies in the frazione of Pontecchio, on the valley floor rather than on the rock itself. The territory reaches from that river confluence up into the Apennine slopes, and the change in elevation shows in what the land produces: white truffle from the valley floor near the Reno, and vineyards on the hills around Pieve del Pino and Mongardino, recognition earned on two different registers of the same ground.

The lower town, built around the rivers and the old road to Pistoia, and the upper slopes, given to woods and terraced vines, read as one territory doing two different kinds of work.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Sasso Marconi

• Villa Griffone - Museo Marconi. Marconi family villa in the frazione of Pontecchio. The mausoleum sits alongside the attic laboratory, and the museum holds working reproductions of his early apparatus.
• Sasso della Glosina. The rock rises directly over the river bend, its bulk visible from the crossing below and from much of the surrounding valley.
• Confluenza Setta-Reno. Meeting of the two valleys at the foot of the rock, with the historic crossing of the Via Porrettana toward Pistoia.

How to get to Sasso Marconi

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bologna is roughly 26 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Sasso Marconi

Vignola

Why visit Vignola

Vignola sits at 125 meters on the right bank of the Panaro, twenty-five kilometers south of Bologna and twenty east of Modena, where the Modenese plain meets the Apennine foothills. The fortress there is documented from the eighth century, raised by the Abbot of Nonantola to guard the abbey's lands before the Contrari family rebuilt it in the fifteenth century as a fortified residence; in 1577 it passed to the Boncompagni-Ludovisi, who held it until 1965.

The palace beside it takes its second name from the family that acquired it, and from the architect born in the town in 1507, who died in 1573 after a career among the leading figures of late Renaissance architecture. The cherries that carry the town's name upriver and down are IGP-protected across twenty-eight communes stretching from Modena to Bologna, and the blossom that precedes the fruit each spring fills the Panaro valley below the walls.

A disused railway, now a greenway, threads through the same ground on its way between Mirandola and Bologna. The town's identity rests on this pairing of a fortified height above the river and an agricultural valley beneath it, one lineage of stone, one of orchards, both still legible in the place today.

We confirmed you can reach this one by train.

What to see in Vignola

• Rocca di Vignola. Eighth-century origin, built to guard the lands of an abbey and later rebuilt as a fortified residence. The frescoed interiors and four corner towers stand over the river much as the rebuilding left them.
• Scala a Chiocciola di Palazzo Barozzi. The 106 steps rise with no central support, an engineering feat as much as a decorative one, tucked inside the palace next to the fortress.
• Palazzo Boncompagni. The palace passed to the family that gives it its name in the late sixteenth century and held the fortress until 1965. Its reception rooms carry frescoes alongside the staircase it is best known for.

How to get to Vignola

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Modena is roughly 34 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Vignola