The complete list
The best small beach towns in Italy that nobody sells you, all of them
144 towns · 14 regions · the complete list
Pineto, Abruzzo
Italy has seven and a half thousand kilometres of coast and the travel industry sells about two hundred of them. The rest is small towns with a beach that the town itself uses: a lido that opens in June, a harbour with a fish counter, a Blue Flag on the pole and no one from abroad to see it.
This is every coastal town in our catalogue under twenty thousand people, 144 of them across 14 regions, best-recognised first. Where a town holds a Bandiera Blu the card says so; that is a water-quality and beach-services award, inspected every year, and it is the closest thing to a beach guarantee that exists.
Pineto
Province: Teramo · 4 m
A planned twentieth-century beach town named for D'Annunzio's poem, with the sixteenth-century Cerrano tower anchoring Abruzzo's first marine protected area.
Rocca San Giovanni
Province: Chieti · 155 m
A walled hill town at 155 meters, founded around 1060 by an abbot guarding the Abbey of San Giovanni in Venere.
Alba Adriatica
Province: Teramo · 5 m
The northernmost of the Teramo coast's seven sisters, a 1956 spin-off from Tortoreto with a fine-sand beach known as the Spiaggia d'Argento.
Silvi
Province: Teramo · 242 m
A split town on the Teramo coast, medieval Silvi Paese at 242 meters above a nine-kilometer beach that built itself on licorice in the 1930s.
Miglianico
Province: Chieti · 125 m
A wine hill town at 125 meters between Pescara and the Adriatic, with the sanctuary of San Pantaleone above an unbroken horizon of vineyards.
Maratea
Province: Potenza · 300 m
Basilicata's only commune on the Tyrrhenian, thirty-two kilometers of rocky coast overlooked by a marble Christ raised inland in 1965.
Policoro
Province: Matera · 25 m
An Ionian-coast town built on the ruins of the Greek polis of Heraclea, with a national museum devoted to the city's finds and a nature reserve running the country's documented sea turtle nesting program.
Nova Siri
Province: Matera · 350 m
A 350-meter Ionian hill town with a Blue Flag beach nine kilometers below, near the site of the ancient Greek colony of Siris.
Bernalda
Province: Matera · 127 m
A 127-meter hill town between the Bradano and Basento, Francis Ford Coppola's ancestral home, holding the Magna Graecia columns of the Tavole Palatine.
San Nicola Arcella
Province: Cosenza · 110 m
A cliff village above the Tyrrhenian Riviera dei Cedri, where a sea arch fronts a cove only reachable on foot or by boat.
The rest of the 144
Calabria15
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Campania20
Friuli-Venezia Giulia4
Lazio4
Liguria33
- Vernazza
- Lerici
- Monterosso al Mare
- Finale Ligure
- Riomaggiore
- Borgio Verezzi
- Arenzano
- Diano
- Framura
- Noli
- Laigueglia
- Ameglia
- Celle Ligure
- Moneglia
- Portovenere
- Levanto
- Cervo
- Cipressa
- Deiva Marina
- Dolceacqua
- Taggia
- Camogli
- Santa Margherita Ligure
- Toirano
- Sestri Levante
- Varazze
- Lavagna
- Pietra Ligure
- Portofino
- Loano
- Recco
- Andora
- Bogliasco
Marche8
Molise2
Apulia15
Sardinia9
Sicily11
Tuscany12
Veneto1
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