The 6 best hill towns you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Rome

1. Oriolo Romano

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

1 h 15 min from Rome · homes €900 to €1,350 a m² in the center · 3,696 people

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

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 15 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Oriolo Romano

2. Ariccia

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists Sintesi here.

41 min from Rome · homes €1,000 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 17,917 people

Why visit Ariccia

Ariccia sits on the rim of the Alban Hills volcanic complex, and the crater geography organizes everything about the place. The town center occupies the ridge; below it on the eastern side the ground drops into the deep crater valley of Vallericcia, crossed by the viaduct linking the town to the next ridge.

The gorge itself became notorious after a series of suicides in the 1990s, now blocked with high railings. Further east and below, the volcanic lakes and the papal estate sit in a cluster within a few kilometers of the town center, part of the same crater system that shaped Ariccia's position in the first place.

The Roman past predates the Baroque town by centuries: Aricia was the first stage out of Rome on the original Via Appia, laid out in 312 BC, and the neighbouring lake was the site of the Latin League's federal sanctuary of Diana Aricina. The porchetta tradition is separate again: whole pork loin, deboned and seasoned with rosemary, garlic, pepper and wild fennel, slow-roasted on rotating spits in wood-fired ovens and served at room temperature in panini or by the etto.

The fraschette that serve it were originally outdoor wine vendors, marked with frasche, branches, as signs, and the town's status as a Città del Vino within the Frascati zone explains why the wine on the table is local rather than incidental. What makes Ariccia distinct among the Castelli towns is that these layers, Roman road terminus, crater rim settlement, unified Baroque set piece, and porchetta town, sit on top of each other in one small place rather than being scattered across the region.

What to see in Ariccia

• Palazzo Chigi + Piazza di Corte (Bernini). The Chigi family's Baroque summer residence. The palazzo, the piazza and the church facing it were designed as one ensemble. The palazzo is preserved as a 17th-c interior museum.
• Santa Maria dell'Assunzione (Bernini). Bernini's circular church, domed and modelled on the Pantheon: small, perfect, often empty.
• Ponte Monumentale. 1854 triple-tier viaduct spanning the Vallericcia crater. Walk across for the panoramic view; the gorge below is wooded and undeveloped.

How to get to Ariccia

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 41 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Ariccia

3. Anagni

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

55 min from Rome · homes €570 to €850 a m² in the center · 20,616 people

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; the town claims four medieval popes, 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 seized 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: the town claims four popes, but it is one pope's humiliation, 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 seized Boniface VIII during the Outrage of Anagni, its thirteenth-century rooms still standing on the hill.

How to get to Anagni

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 55 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Anagni

4. Capranica

Best for a stage of a long walk. The Via Francigena passes through.

1 h 12 min from Rome · homes €650 to €950 a m² in the center · 6,341 people

Written about. No. 64. Read the letter →

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

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 12 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Capranica

5. Tarquinia

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

1 h 17 min from Rome · homes €1,200 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 15,856 people

Written about. No. 68. Read the letter →

Why visit Tarquinia

Tarquinia sits on a plateau at 133 meters above the Maremma plain in northern Lazio, six kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast. The Etruscan city of Tarquinii stood on the adjacent Colle della Civita and was one of the twelve great Etruscan capitals, ringed in the fourth century BC by about eight kilometers of walls in blocks of local stone.

What survives above ground is mostly medieval: the present town grew here in the Middle Ages as Corneto, became Corneto Tarquinia in 1872 and took the ancient name alone in 1922. What survives below ground is what made the place a UNESCO site in 2004.

The Monterozzi necropolis on the hill east of town holds 6,000 rock-cut tombs from the seventh century BC onward, and around two hundred of them carry painted interiors. The frescoed banquets, dancers, hunters and musicians inside Tarquinia's tombs form one of the largest bodies of Etruscan painting to survive.

The Palazzo Vitelleschi in the upper town houses the national museum and the Winged Horses terracottas.

What to see in Tarquinia

• Necropoli dei Monterozzi. UNESCO Etruscan necropolis on the hill east of the medieval town, 6,000 rock-cut tombs with around 200 painted interiors from the 7th century BC onward.
• Museo Archeologico Nazionale Tarquiniense. Housed in the 15th-century Palazzo Vitelleschi, with Etruscan sarcophagi, painted slabs and the famous Cavalli Alati terracottas.
• Palazzo Vitelleschi. Early Renaissance palace built between 1436 and 1439 for Cardinal Vitelleschi, blending Gothic and Renaissance elements in a single façade.

How to get to Tarquinia

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 17 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Tarquinia

6. Tivoli

Best for a day out from Rome. It is 31 min by car.

31 min from Rome · homes €1,150 to €1,650 a m² in the center · 55,115 people

Why visit Tivoli

Tivoli sits at 235 meters on the Aniene where it drops 120 meters off the Tiburtini hills, twenty-five kilometers east of Rome. The Romans called it Tibur and built it up as their summer station; the moneyed classes carried on building here for two thousand years afterward.

Two of those projects became UNESCO sites, listed separately despite standing close together. Hadrian's estate, four kilometers below town, covers 120 hectares with the remains of thirty monumental buildings the emperor built between 117 and 138 AD to recreate the architectural memories of Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor.

The Renaissance garden inside the upper town was laid out from 1550 onward for a cardinal of the Este family; its grounds carry 51 fountains powered entirely by gravity from the Aniene. The cardinal stripped much of the marble from Hadrian's estate to decorate his own grounds, so the imperial villa on the plain and the garden in the upper town are bound together by more than proximity: one was quarried to build the other.

Below them both, the Villa Gregoriana park drops into the gorge where the river was diverted in 1832 to create the 120-meter Cascata Grande. The travertine quarries that built Rome are still working in the plain below.

The upper town, the lower estate, and the gorge between them form a single continuous cut through two thousand years of building, borrowing, and quarrying around the same fall of water.

What to see in Tivoli

• Villa d'Este. The fountains step down the hillside in tiers, fed by nothing but gravity, so the sound of falling water carries through the whole garden. Cardinal Ippolito d'Este stripped much of the marble for it from Hadrian's villa down the hill.
• Villa Adriana. The remains of thirty monumental buildings spread across the Tiburtine plain, among them the Canopo and the Teatro Marittimo, a walled island retreat inside the larger estate.
• Villa Gregoriana. The park drops into the gorge cut by the Aniene, where the river was diverted through Monte Catillo to feed the fall below town.

How to get to Tivoli

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 31 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Tivoli