The 10 best towns known for what they grow within two hours of Trento

1. San Zeno di Montagna

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists Taverna Kus here.

1 h 13 min from Trento · homes €1,400 to €2,050 a m² in the center · 1,500 people

Why visit San Zeno di Montagna

The village sits thirty kilometers northwest of Verona. It took its current name in 1871, after unification, borrowing the name of Verona's patron saint; before that it was called Montagna di Monte Baldo, a plainer name tied directly to the mountain above it.

Pastoralism here goes back to the Copper and Bronze ages, when small communities drove herds up from the plain in summer along routes that still cross the mountain. Sheep and goats gave way to cattle as the dominant economy in the seventeenth century.

The frazione of Prada holds the longest of these pasture terraces, its Church of San Bartolomeo built for the shepherds who worked the ground seasonally rather than for a settled parish. Below, the chestnut groves that ring the village are a separate, older layer of the economy, worked at lower altitude while the herds went up.

What emerges is a village organized on a vertical axis: lake view at one elevation, chestnut groves at another, pasture and summer huts higher still, each belonging to a different rhythm of use rather than to a single center.

Taverna Kus is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in San Zeno di Montagna

• Balcone del Garda. The viewpoint that names the commune, a place to stand at the edge of the ridge and take in the water and the opposite shore at once.
• Monte Baldo. Regional park rising above the village, its slopes still worked as pasture, with the old herding paths climbing through it toward the grass terraces higher up.
• Prada. Three-kilometer grass terrace on the mountain, with the Church of San Bartolomeo standing among the summer pasture huts.

How to get to San Zeno di Montagna

Trento is about 1 h 13 min away by road.

Everything we know about San Zeno di Montagna

2. Pomponesco

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

1 h 58 min from Trento · homes €600 to €750 a m² in the center · 1,700 people

Why visit Pomponesco

Pomponesco sits at 21 meters on the left bank of the Po, at the southern edge of Mantova province twenty-five kilometers north of Parma. The Roman Pompea family gave the village its name; the Etruscans and Gauls held the ground before them.

The town grid radiates from where a castle once stood, two axes crossing to divide the settlement into four symmetrical quarters, and that castle was pulled down by French troops in the eighteenth century, leaving the open square that replaced it. Around that square the courtier palaces still stand, most built between 1590 and 1630, and behind their arcades a number keep original wooden ceilings and, in rarer cases, original frescoes.

The bell tower of the Comune and the campanile of the parish church face each other across the piazza, almost in competition, before the view narrows toward the embankment and the river beyond. The result is a village whose whole shape, from the vanished castle at its center to the water at its edge, still reads as the plan one Gonzaga governor imposed on it four centuries ago.

The catch: It is the longest drive on this list: 1 h 58 min from Trento.

What to see in Pomponesco

• Piazza XXIII Aprile. Arcaded square where the Gonzaga castle stood until the French demolition in the eighteenth century, lined with late-sixteenth-century courtier palaces.
• Chiesa di Santa Felicita e dei Sette Martiri. Parish church on the central square, with a tall bell tower facing the town hall across the piazza.
• Late-Cinquecento Gonzaga plan. Town grid laid out by Giulio Cesare Gonzaga at the end of the sixteenth century, with two axes dividing the village into four symmetrical quarters.

How to get to Pomponesco

Trento is about 1 h 58 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pomponesco

3. Follina

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

1 h 57 min from Trento · 3,607 people

Why visit Follina

Follina sits at 191 meters where a stream cuts out of the Treviso Prealps into the upper Prosecco hills, sixty-five kilometers north of Padova. The name comes from follare, to full wool, and the Sanavalle stream powered fulling mills here from antiquity through the nineteenth century.

A monastic complex existed before the Cistercians arrived in the mid-twelfth century, likely a Benedictine house dependent on San Fermo di Verona. The Cistercians built the Abbey of Santa Maria from 1170; the cloister was completed in 1268.

The abbey is now a minor basilica and parish seat, a national monument since 1921, with frescoes of the Veneto-Byzantine school in the chapter house and a thirteenth-century stone Madonna inside the church. The Brandolini family, lords of nearby Cison di Valmarino, used Follina as a textile center through the Venetian period.

The borgo holds five designations at once: Borghi più belli, UNESCO for the Prosecco hills, Bandiera Arancione, Cittaslow and Città del Vino. The frazione of Pedeguarda holds the older parish church; the centro of Follina runs along the abbey wall and the stream that powered the mills.

La Corte (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Osteria dai Mazzeri (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Al Castelletto (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Follina

• Abbazia di Santa Maria. Cistercian abbey built from 1170, with the cloister completed in 1268, raised to minor basilica and a national monument since 1921.
• Chiostro dell'Abbazia. Cistercian cloister of 1268, with twin colonnettes, sculpted capitals and a central well, intact in its medieval form.
• Sala del Capitolo. Abbey chapter house with frescoes of the Veneto-Byzantine school from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

How to get to Follina

Trento is about 1 h 57 min away by road.

Everything we know about Follina

4. San Benedetto Po

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

1 h 38 min from Trento · homes €700 to €950 a m² in the center · 6,729 people

Why visit San Benedetto Po

San Benedetto Po sits at 19 meters in the flat Po plain, 22 kilometers southeast of Mantova, on what was once an island between the Po and the Lirone rivers. The town has no origin apart from the abbey: in 1007 Tedald of Canossa, grandfather of Matilda, granted half his land between the two rivers to the Benedictines, and the resulting monastery became one of the principal centers of the Gregorian Reform in northern Italy.

Matilda herself, the countess who hosted the emperor's penance at Canossa in 1077, was buried within it for five centuries before her remains went to Rome. The abbey held its position from its founding until the Napoleonic suppression of 1797 emptied the community out, by which time it had grown its church, its three cloisters, its refectory and infirmary.

What is left standing today is essentially the monastery's own floor plan with the town arranged around it. A place built entirely by and for a religious institution, still legible as such long after the monks themselves are gone.

What to see in San Benedetto Po

• Abbazia di San Benedetto in Polirone. The complex holds frescoes by Correggio and statues by Begarelli, added when Giulio Romano restructured it between 1540 and 1547.
• Basilica di San Benedetto. The church Giulio Romano redesigned stands at cathedral scale, the visual center around which the rest of the monastery is arranged.
• Chiostri di Polirone. Three cloisters, one for each major building phase from medieval through Renaissance, forming the working spine of the monastery behind the church.

How to get to San Benedetto Po

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 1 h 38 min away by road.

Everything we know about San Benedetto Po

5. Lazise

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

1 h 5 min from Trento · homes €2,950 to €4,400 a m² in the center · 6,850 people

Why visit Lazise

Lazise sits at 76 meters on the southeastern shore of Lake Garda, twenty kilometers northwest of Verona. The first walls went up shortly after the 983 charter; Venice took the town in 1405 and held it until Napoleon arrived in 1796, and Porta Lion, on the south, still carries the winged lion of Saint Mark from that period of rule.

The castle anchors the southern corner of the fortifications while the harbor sits enclosed within their reach, and the church and the customs house both face onto that same stretch of water, one built for worship and later pressed into use as a warehouse, the other built outright for Venice to tax what passed through the port. Behind the town, the morainic hills carry the vines of the Bardolino DOC, and Lazise counts itself among the Veneto's wine and honey communes.

The town reads, in short, as a small fortified port whose walls, harbor and customs works were all built to serve and guard the same trade on the same shore.

What to see in Lazise

• Castello Scaligero. Rectangular fortress at the south corner of the walls, with five square towers and a fortified dock built for the lake galleys, facing Lake Garda.
• Mura medievali. Thirteen surviving towers and three gates, San Zeno, Nuova and Lion, ring the old town along the shore of Lake Garda.
• Chiesa di San Nicolò. Romanesque church on the harbor, with frescoes attributed to the Giotto school and a former function as a customs warehouse.

How to get to Lazise

Trento is about 1 h 5 min away by road.

Everything we know about Lazise

6. Montagnana

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

1 h 53 min from Trento · homes €1,100 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 9,110 people

Why visit Montagnana

Montagnana sits at 16 meters on the lower Padova plain, thirty-five kilometers southwest of Padova, on the watershed between the Adige and the Bacchiglione. The wall ring is unbroken enough that the town's whole plan still reads as the fortification that produced it: the castle anchors the eastern gate, the rocca anchors the western one, and the road to Verona runs between them through what was once contested ground between Ezzelino's garrison and the Carraresi who came after.

Inside the walls, the center holds the Duomo and the two flanking palazzi around Piazza Maggiore, while the villa built for the cardinal stands deliberately outside the gate, a country house that still shows its face to the town. The May festival now fills the same ground the walls were built to defend, the modern economy of the place staged inside its medieval perimeter.

What to see in Montagnana

• Cinta muraria. Six to eight meters high and ninety-six centimeters thick, the rampart carries a continuous parapet walk, so the towers can be counted from above rather than just from the road.
• Castello di San Zeno. Fortress at the eastern gate, built by Ezzelino III da Romano in 1242, with the Mastio tower 38 meters high and a civic museum inside.
• Rocca degli Alberi. Western gate fortress built by the Carraresi between 1360 and 1362, with a moat and double drawbridge defending the road to Verona.

How to get to Montagnana

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 1 h 53 min away by road.

Everything we know about Montagnana

7. Valdobbiadene

Best for Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG. The town gives its name to Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG.

1 h 50 min from Trento · 9,918 people

Why visit Valdobbiadene

Valdobbiadene sits at 253 meters in the Treviso Prealps, fifty-five kilometers northwest of Venice, on the western edge of the Conegliano-Valdobbiadene UNESCO landscape inscribed in 2019. The town gives its name to the Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG, and its own centro storico sits above a cluster of frazioni, among them the hilltop parcel that ranks as the zone's peak cru and the hamlet of Colderove with its sixteenth-century church.

Producers work these slopes on a shared calendar: the Antica Fiera di San Gregorio opens the working year on the second Monday of March, the frazioni of Santo Stefano and San Pietro di Barbozza hold their DOCG wine shows in spring, and cellar doors along the signed wine route stay open through the warm months as the harvest advances. The rhythm of the town follows the vine from one edge of the appellation to the other, with the hilltop parcel standing as the point the whole zone is measured against.

Tre Noghere (MICHELIN), Alla Cima (Gambero Rosso) and Locanda Sandi (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Valdobbiadene

• Cartizze. Rocky, south-facing hilltop with vineyards from 200 to 350 meters, worked in classified parcels above San Pietro di Barbozza.
• Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta. Neoclassical cathedral on Piazza Marconi, the civic anchor of the centro storico.
• Villa dei Cedri. Nineteenth-century villa and park at the foot of the centro storico, for forty years the seat of the Mostra Nazionale degli Spumanti and since 2019 of the association for the UNESCO Prosecco Hills.

How to get to Valdobbiadene

Trento is about 1 h 50 min away by road.

Everything we know about Valdobbiadene

8. Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella

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

1 h 10 min from Trento · homes €1,150 to €1,700 a m² in the center · 11,880 people

Why visit Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella

Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella sits at 174 meters in the heart of the Valpolicella DOC, fifteen kilometers northwest of Verona, on the rolling hills that close the eastern shore of Lake Garda. The commune groups five frazioni around the main village: Domegliara, Gargagnago, Monte, Ponton and the ridge settlement above them.

Gargagnago sits at the foot of the hills, its cellars closest to the valley floor; the ridge frazione occupies the higher limestone ground, reached by a climb steep enough to have earned the church its nickname. Between them the Serego Alighieri estate has worked the same parcels since Pietro Alighieri, Dante's son, who had followed his father into exile in Verona, bought the property in 1353, and the family still grows Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara there, with the Vaio Armaron Amarone counted among the appellation's cru benchmarks.

The pattern of the commune is one of a valley economy and a hill economy sharing a single administrative roof: wine pressed and aged below, an older, stiller settlement kept above it, with the quarries that once supplied Verona still worked on the slopes that join the two.

Dalla Rosa Alda (MICHELIN) and Masi Agricola (World's 50 Best) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella

• Pieve di San Giorgio Ingannapoltron. Romanesque parish church whose ciborium columns carry an inscription naming the master builder Orso and his disciples Juventino and Juviano.
• San Giorgio di Valpolicella. Frazione on the limestone ridge above the valley, in the Borghi più belli d'Italia network, nicknamed Ingannapoltron for the steep climb up to it.
• Villa Serego Alighieri. Estate still owned by the Alighieri descendants; produces Vaio Armaron Amarone from Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara grown on the same parcels the family has worked.

How to get to Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 1 h 10 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella

9. Marostica

Best for olive oil. It belongs to the national association of olive oil towns.

1 h 43 min from Trento · homes €1,100 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 14,052 people

Why visit Marostica

Marostica sits at 103 meters at the foot of the Asolan hills, forty-five kilometers northwest of Padova. Cangrande della Scala took the town in 1311, building his lower fortress on the plain and a second stronghold on the hill above it, then joining the two with a wall long enough to carry two dozen towers and four gates between them.

The arrangement is unusual: most walled towns fortify a single point, but here the defense runs uphill, turning the slope itself into the connecting structure between plain and ridge. The upper stronghold did not survive the artillery of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1510 and has stood as a ruin since, while the lower one remained inhabited and working, which is why the town's public life, its square, its church, its chess board, still gathers at the base of the hill rather than at its summit.

The cherries grown on the slopes to the north, since given IGP status, are the one product of the surrounding land that made it into the local kitchen as the crostata. What the town amounts to is a fortification that never stopped being a town: the walls did not seal Marostica off from its hillside, they organized it, and the square where the chess is played every two years sits exactly where the two castles' lines of sight once met.

La Rosina (MICHELIN) and Madonnetta (Slow Food and MICHELIN) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Marostica

• Castello Inferiore. Built from 1311 on Piazza Castello, its keep rising 44 meters over the square, with a museum inside on the chess match traditions.
• Castello Superiore. Ruined by Venetian artillery in 1510, standing on Monte Pausolino and reached by a footpath through the walls, with views over the Brenta valley.
• Mura di Marostica. Fourteenth-century walls running two kilometers between the two castles, with twenty-four towers and four gates; the parapet walk is open to the public.

How to get to Marostica

Trento is about 1 h 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about Marostica

10. Valeggio sul Mincio

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

1 h 15 min from Trento · homes €1,250 to €1,800 a m² in the center · 16,059 people

Why visit Valeggio sul Mincio

Valeggio sul Mincio sits at 88 meters on the morainic hills shaped by the Garda glaciers, twenty kilometers southwest of Verona and ten kilometers from the southern end of Lake Garda. The Mincio cuts north-south through the commune and was the Veneto-Lombardy military frontier for centuries.

The frazione of Borghetto on the river is one of I Borghi più belli d'Italia, a single line of houses and water mills along the left bank under the Castello Scaligero. The fortified Ponte Visconteo, built in 1393 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan as part of the sixteen-kilometer Serraglio defensive line, is 650 meters long and 25 meters wide and still spans the valley above the village.

The local pasta is the Nodo d'Amore, an oversize hand-rolled tortellino with meat filling; the third Tuesday of June it is served to four thousand diners at a single table laid across the Visconti bridge. The Parco Giardino Sigurtà, a sixty-hectare landscape garden two kilometers north, draws over half a million visitors a year, peaking with the Tulipanomania bloom in April.

Ristorante Antica Locanda Mincio (Locali Storici) and Alla Borsa (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Valeggio sul Mincio

• Borghetto sul Mincio. Riverside hamlet on the left bank of the Mincio, one of I Borghi più belli d'Italia, with surviving water mills and a single arcaded line of houses.
• Ponte Visconteo. Fortified bridge-dam built in 1393 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, 650 meters long and 25 wide, anchor of the Serraglio defensive line.
• Castello Scaligero. Della Scala fortress on the hill above Borghetto, built in the thirteenth century as the southern hinge of the Verona defensive line.

How to get to Valeggio sul Mincio

Trento is about 1 h 15 min away by road.

Everything we know about Valeggio sul Mincio