The best mountain towns within two hours of Turin

1. Ostana

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

1 h 34 min from Turin · homes €660 to €950 a m² in the center · 87 people

Why visit Ostana

Ostana sits at 1,280m on the south-facing slope of the upper Po valley, in the Occitan linguistic island that runs across the upper valleys of Cuneo and Torino provinces, a dialect still spoken by maybe 50,000 people. In 1921 the village had 1,200 residents working rye, pasture and chestnut at altitude; by 1985 that had fallen to 25, with over 60 houses in ruin and the village close to abandoned, near-officially so.

The reversal began in 1985 when the newly elected mayor, an architect named Giacomo Lombardo, set a 30-year masterplan in motion: rebuild the ruined houses in their original 17th-19th-century stone-and-larch style, draw in residents through Occitan culture, and reposition the village as both an alpine architecture showcase and a cultural center for that language. It worked on its own terms.

By 2025 the population had climbed back to 87, still small but stable, the demographic curve reversed rather than merely slowed, and the 60-plus restored houses carry insulation modern enough to meet Class A energy ratings behind their traditional stone and larch. The cultural center, combining library, restaurant and events space, has anchored the new community life since 2012.

The village holds the Borghi piu belli d'Italia inscription despite its tiny population, and architectural press across Europe has taken to citing the case as a model for alpine village rebirth generally. The upper village of restored houses and the lower functions of trail junction and literary festival now depend on each other: walkers on the long-distance trail that crosses the village, and on the former royal hunting trail alongside it, pass through a place that would have had nothing to offer them forty years ago, and the writers who come each year for the minority-language literary prize, now in its fifteenth year and drawing entrants from Occitan to Sardinian to Maori to Welsh, stay in houses that were rubble within living memory.

The food is Occitan-alpine: gnocchi con bagna cauda, cunsa di bietole, raviolas di rapa, raclette and fontina mountain cheese, with Barolo and Barbaresco from the Langhe 60 km east. Like other alpine villages, Ostana goes quiet in winter, its high season running June to September.

What the demographic curve and the rebuilding record show together is a village that did not simply survive its emptying out but rebuilt itself around the very things, language and landscape, that might otherwise have been lost with it.

The village sits at 1280 meters.

The catch: January nights average 3 degrees below zero.

What to see in Ostana

• Monviso direct view (3,841m). Belvedere terraces across the centro line up on the pyramid face-on, the angle that made the village's postcard reputation.
• Restored 17th-19th-c stone borgo. Larch-and-stone houses standing where ruins stood a generation ago, the insulation invisible behind old materials. Streets built for a population many times the current one, now filled in more slowly.
• Occitan culture + Premio Ostana. The Occitan dialect is audible in the village rather than archived, and the Premio Ostana, Scritture in Lingua Madre, brings minority-language writers here once a year.

How to get to Ostana

Turin is about 1 h 34 min away by road.

Everything we know about Ostana

2. Usseaux

Best for a slow weekend. The Touring Club gives it its orange flag for small inland towns.

1 h 32 min from Turin · homes €680 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 174 people

Why visit Usseaux

Usseaux sits at 1,416 meters in the upper Val Chisone, fifty-five kilometers west of Torino on the road that climbs toward the Colle delle Finestre. The commune holds 174 residents across the capoluogo and four high hamlets: Balboutet, Laux, Fraisse and Pourrieres, each with its own parish and its own dialect inflection.

In 1343 these communities joined the autonomous Escartons Republic, a federation of alpine villages that bought their freedom from the Dauphin and self-governed in Occitan for four hundred years until Napoleon dissolved them. The Waldensian Reformation reached the valley in the sixteenth century and left a network of temples on the slopes below.

The contemporary signature of Usseaux is the murales project: more than forty paintings on house walls showing alpine work, animals and peasant scenes, layered over stone facades that already carry sundials and carved lintels. Balboutet faces south and reads its hours from those dials.

Laux holds a small lake at the foot of the meadows above the village.

The village sits at 1416 meters.

The catch: January nights average 7 degrees below zero.

What to see in Usseaux

• I Murales. More than forty painted murals across stone facades in the capoluogo and the borgate, depicting alpine work, peasant scenes and forest animals.
• Balboutet. South-facing hamlet known for the sundials painted and carved across the facades of its stone houses, marking time in alpine tradition.
• Lago del Laux. Small alpine lake on the meadows above the hamlet of Laux, a short walk from the village and ringed by fishing huts.

How to get to Usseaux

Turin is about 1 h 32 min away by road.

Everything we know about Usseaux

3. Ronco Canavese

Best for walks in a national park. Part of the comune lies in a national park.

1 h 28 min from Turin · homes €430 to €640 a m² in the center · 383 people

Why visit Ronco Canavese

The commune's territory climbs from the valley floor around 774 meters up to alpine summits above 3,400 meters, much of it inside the protected area of the park. The first settlements between the tenth and eleventh centuries cleared land the Romans had left forested; the name comes from the Latin runcus, ground newly broken.

The first parish was recorded in the thirteenth century. Three hundred and eighty-three people live in the commune year-round, spread across the capoluogo and a dozen hamlets that make up the Valle Soana.

The park visitor center based here turns that geography into its subject, tracking the biodiversity, ibex, chamois and golden eagle among it, that the valley's climb from 774 to over 3,400 meters supports. The Comuni Virtuosi recognition signals a working line on waste, water and community use of public land.

A village this size, spread this thin across a valley this steep, has had to make an ongoing practice of managing what little flat ground and shared resource it has.

The village sits at 956 meters.

What to see in Ronco Canavese

• Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso. Reached on the Piemonte side from the Valle Soana, home to ibex, chamois, marmots and golden eagles.
• Centro Visitatori del Parco. Park visitor center titled 'Tradizioni e biodiversità in una Valle Fantastica', dedicated to the natural and cultural heritage of the valley.
• Frazioni della Valle Soana. Stone hamlets scattered up the valley, where the local language is still spoken in households and on the trail signs.

How to get to Ronco Canavese

Turin is about 1 h 28 min away by road.

Everything we know about Ronco Canavese

4. Etroubles

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

1 h 51 min from Turin · homes €1,550 to €2,100 a m² in the center · 476 people

Why visit Etroubles

Etroubles sits at 1,280 meters on the Italian side of the pass, the last full village before the climb to the border. The Romans called it Restopolis, a transit point on the way to the Alpis Poenina, and the same line of travel became the pilgrimage route that later carried traffic between Canterbury and Rome and beyond.

The village holds Borghi più Belli d'Italia and Bandiera Arancione status, a rare combination for a settlement of fewer than 500 people. The historic center doubles as the open-air museum: sculptures, installations and contemporary works by international artists sit on house façades and in the squares, so a walk through the lanes and past the parish church is also a walk through a curated route of outdoor art.

The first dairy in Valle d'Aosta opened on the road to the hamlet of Vachéry, founding the local Fontina production chain that still runs through the upper valley. Summer brings La Veillà, an evening of revived old trades, wheat threshing and live cheesemaking, a reminder that the pass traffic and the dairy trade are the two things that built the village: one brought travelers through on their way to somewhere else, the other gave the place something of its own to make, sell, and be known for beyond the route across the border.

The village sits at 1280 meters.

The catch: January nights average 4 degrees below zero.

What to see in Etroubles

• Musée à ciel ouvert. Sculptures, installations and contemporary paintings fixed to house façades and set along the streets, turning a walk through the village into a curated route rather than a stroll past monuments.
• Chiesa parrocchiale di Sainte-Marie-Madeleine. Parish church at the center of the village, dedicated to Mary Magdalene and rebuilt on earlier medieval foundations.
• Centro storico. Stone-walled historic center with narrow lanes and traditional Valdostan houses with wooden balconies, the streets themselves lined with the museum's outdoor works.

How to get to Etroubles

Turin is about 1 h 51 min away by road.

Everything we know about Etroubles

5. Gressoney-Saint-Jean

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

1 h 30 min from Turin · homes €3,000 to €4,500 a m² in the center · 767 people

Why visit Gressoney-Saint-Jean

Gressoney-Saint-Jean sits at 1,385 meters in the upper Lys valley, one of the Walser settlements south of Monte Rosa, founded by a German-speaking people who crossed the Theodul Pass from the Valais in the thirteenth century and settled the slopes around Monte Rosa. The local dialect, Titsch, is an Alemannic variant still taught in the village school.

The traditional Walser stadel, a wood-and-stone barn raised on staddle stones, survives in dozens of hamlets above the village, from the center up toward Belvedere at the foot of the Colle Ranzola, where older residents still use Titsch daily. The village and its hamlets read as layers of the same migration: the parish sits in the valley bottom, the stadel-built hamlets climb the slopes above it, and the Lys glacier and the peaks that feed it close the valley at its head, the river taking its name from that same ice.

What began as a thirteenth-century Alemannic settlement on the far side of an alpine pass has kept its language, its barns, and its orientation toward the mountain that still supplies its water.

The village sits at 1385 meters.

The catch: January nights average 7 degrees below zero.

What to see in Gressoney-Saint-Jean

• Castel Savoia. Five asymmetric turrets in gray local stone, standing above the village as a regional museum open to visitors.
• Walser Cultural Center / Ecomuseum. Museum on Via Castello documenting Walser language, costume, architecture and migration, with reconstructed stadel and traditional interiors.
• Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista. Parish church in the village center, replaced over the centuries on the site of the earliest medieval chapel of the upper Lys.

How to get to Gressoney-Saint-Jean

Turin is about 1 h 30 min away by road.

Everything we know about Gressoney-Saint-Jean

6. Limone Piemonte

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

1 h 43 min from Turin · homes €2,100 to €3,100 a m² in the center · 1,343 people

Why visit Limone Piemonte

Limone Piemonte sits at 1,000 meters in the Vermenagna valley, twenty kilometers from Cuneo and fourteen from the Colle di Tenda, the historic pass into France. The Riserva Bianca ski domain rises behind the village from 1,050 to 2,085 meters, with eighty kilometers of pistes served by one gondola, ten chairlifts and three drag lifts.

The Cuneo-Ventimiglia railway, opened across this valley in 1900, runs ninety kilometers from the plain to the sea with thirty-three tunnels and twenty-seven bridges, one of the steepest mountain lines in Europe. In the village center, Piazza del Municipio holds a 16th-century stone fountain and the Gothic parish church of San Pietro in Vincoli, with elements of Romanesque and Gothic stonework from the 14th and 15th centuries.

The town empties between seasons and fills twice a year, for the ski months and for the alpine summer.

The village sits at 1000 meters.

What to see in Limone Piemonte

• Chiesa di San Pietro in Vincoli. Gothic parish church on Piazza del Municipio, built between the 14th and 15th centuries on Romanesque foundations.
• Riserva Bianca. Ski domain rising from 1,050 to 2,085 meters with 80 km of pistes, the main winter draw of the southern Piemonte Alps.
• Centro storico. Stone village core around Piazza del Municipio, with a 16th-century fountain and a Gothic-Romanesque parish church.

How to get to Limone Piemonte

It has its own railway station. Turin is about 1 h 43 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Limone Piemonte

7. Ayas

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists 1568 dell'Hotel Aethos Monterosa here.

1 h 38 min from Turin · homes €3,800 to €5,600 a m² in the center · 1,358 people

Why visit Ayas

Ayas runs along the upper Évançon valley, its municipal seat at Antagnod (1,710 meters) and its main resort centers at Champoluc (1,568 meters) and the hamlet at the valley head. The 1,358 residents are spread across these three villages and dozens of smaller hamlets.

Antagnod is the older village, its parish church holding the seventeenth-century altar that makes it the religious seat of the commune. Champoluc sits lower, on a flat stretch of the upper valley, and functions as the working entry point to the lift domain, with gondola and cable car reaching across two cols into Piedmont.

The hamlet at the valley head keeps the medieval name of the German-speaking settlers who farmed these slopes after crossing from Valais in the thirteenth century, while the valley itself is watered by glacial melt from above. The commune, in short, is a set of villages at different altitudes doing different jobs: worship in one, skiing in another, memory of settlement in a third, all fed by the same glacier and the same river.

The village sits at 1710 meters.

The catch: January nights average 8 degrees below zero.

What to see in Ayas

• Chiesa di San Martino. Parish church in Antagnod with a seventeenth-century polyptych altar, the religious seat of the commune.
• Monterosa Ski. Lift-linked domain reaching 3,250 meters, crossing two cols to link the valley with Gressoney-La-Trinité and Alagna Valsesia.
• Castore e Polluce. The 4,226-meter Castor and 4,091-meter Pollux, twin peaks of the Monte Rosa massif on the Italy-Switzerland border above the valley head.

How to get to Ayas

Turin is about 1 h 38 min away by road.

Everything we know about Ayas

8. Ormea

Best for a small town. 1,454 people live here.

1 h 42 min from Turin · homes €720 to €1,050 a m² in the center · 1,454 people

Why visit Ormea

Ormea sits at 736 meters in the upper Tanaro valley, at the confluence of the Armella stream and the river, with the Pizzo d'Ormea rising to 2,476 meters above the rooftops. The historic center has a recognisable heart-shaped perimeter, set against the Ligurian Alps that separate Cuneo from Imperia and Albenga; on clear days the Riviera sea is visible.

The territory belonged to the Aleramici and then the Marquises of Ceva from 967, contested through the 1200s with the Clavesana branch and the Republic of Genoa, before passing to the Savoys in 1558. In 1722 it became a marquisate under Carlo Vincenzo Ferrero d'Ormea, who built a textile mill capable of competing with English production until the French Revolution and Napoleon's army destroyed both the factory in the main square and the medieval castle.

The commune carries Borghi Autentici and Città del Castagno; the chestnut harvest runs the calendar from October.

The village sits at 736 meters.

What to see in Ormea

• Centro storico. Heart-shaped medieval core at the confluence of the Tanaro and Armella, narrow lanes between stone houses, with views to the Pizzo d'Ormea.
• Ruderi del Castello. Remains of the medieval castle held by the Marquises of Ceva and the Savoys, destroyed during Napoleon's Italian campaign at the end of the 18th century.
• Pizzo d'Ormea. 2,476-meter Ligurian-Alps peak above the town, the dominant summit of the upper Tanaro and a long-day hike from the centro storico.

How to get to Ormea

Turin is about 1 h 42 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Ormea

9. Aymavilles

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

1 h 46 min from Turin · homes €1,300 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 2,098 people

Why visit Aymavilles

The village sits on the right bank of the river, eight kilometers west of Aosta, at the point where a side valley opens toward the Gran Paradiso massif. The name traces to Caius Avilius Caimus, the Roman from Padua who commissioned the aqueduct-bridge over the Grand'Eyvia, so the settlement's identity is bound to that gorge crossing rather than to the castle that later came to dominate its skyline.

Around the castle the ground has been given over to terraced vineyards, the fruit of which the Cave des Onze Communes, the region's largest cooperative, draws in from this slope and from the neighbouring communes of Sarre, Saint-Pierre and Introd. The result is a village organized around two axes that rarely overlap: one running up toward the national park and the high side valley, the other lying flat along the river terraces where the vines are grown.

What holds Aymavilles together is less a single monument than this position at a threshold, a place people pass through on the way to the high valley or use as the working ground for wine that is drunk elsewhere.

The village sits at 646 meters.

What to see in Aymavilles

• Castello di Aymavilles. The rectangular medieval core is still legible beneath the additions: Aimone di Challant's four towers give the building its silhouette from the valley road, while the eighteenth-century decoration softens the fortress into a residence.
• Pont d'Aël. The arch carries the water channel across the gorge on a single span, and the covered passage beneath it can still be walked, putting a visitor directly under the old aqueduct bed with the torrent below.
• Cave des Onze Communes. Largest wine cooperative in Valle d'Aosta, open since 1990, working over sixty hectares of vineyards around Sarre, Saint-Pierre, Introd and Aymavilles.

How to get to Aymavilles

Turin is about 1 h 46 min away by road.

Everything we know about Aymavilles

10. Valtournenche

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list three tables here.

1 h 34 min from Turin · homes €2,600 to €3,900 a m² in the center · 2,189 people

Why visit Valtournenche

Valtournenche sits at 1,524 meters along the Marmore torrent, a long upper-valley commune running from above Antey-Saint-André up to the Italian foot of the peak the Swiss call the Matterhorn. The road from Châtillon climbs about 1,500 meters over 27 kilometers and ends at Breuil-Cervinia below the glaciers, tracing the whole rise of the valley in a single line from river town to ice.

The village itself is the older story, set apart from the resort that grew up at the valley head. It was here that the guide who led the Italian race for the mountain was born in 1829, reaching the summit from the southwest ridge three days after the British party arrived from the Swiss side.

The gorge below the resort was opened to visitors that same year, a second, quieter opening alongside the mountain's. Upper valley and lower village, resort and centro storico, read together as one place organized around a single ascent: the mountain gave the valley its name abroad, the village gave it the men who first climbed it.

The village sits at 1524 meters.

The catch: January nights average 6 degrees below zero.

What to see in Valtournenche

• Il Cervino. The pyramidal peak closes the valley head, a wall of rock and ice standing over the resort and the village below it.
• Breuil-Cervinia. Resort frazione with around 150 kilometers of pistes linked across the border to Zermatt.
• Piazza delle Guide. Main square of Valtournenche village, its facades set with plaques honouring the valley's great guides and mountaineers, Carrel among them.

How to get to Valtournenche

Turin is about 1 h 34 min away by road.

Everything we know about Valtournenche