The 7 best towns that cure their own meat within two hours of Padua

1. Pieve Tesino

Best for a small town. 669 people live here.

1 h 51 min from Padua · homes €1,200 to €1,450 a m² in the center · 669 people

Why visit Pieve Tesino

Pieve Tesino sits at 843 meters on the Altopiano del Tesino, a small plateau in eastern Trentino about forty kilometers from Trento, shared with the villages of Castello Tesino and Cinte Tesino. The plateau's isolation shaped its economy: with little arable land to keep them, generations of families went out across Europe instead, working as itinerant sellers of prints, books and small art objects, and some of them settled permanently, founding shops as far off as Madrid and Saint Petersburg.

That outward movement sits alongside the village's other export, a man rather than a trade. Alcide De Gasperi was born here in 1881 and went on to lead eight successive governments between 1945 and 1953, working alongside Schuman, Adenauer and Monnet on the early shape of European integration.

Above the houses, the arboretum climbs through alpine flora to a garden built in the shape of a parliamentary chamber, a piece of landscaping that answers his career directly rather than referring back to the trading families below. The plateau, in other words, has sent two things outward across the same borders: goods carried by hand, and an idea of how the continent's institutions might fit together.

Both are commemorated here, but neither was built here to stay.

The catch: January nights average 6 degrees below zero.

What to see in Pieve Tesino

• Casa Museo Alcide De Gasperi. The statesman's birthplace, opened as a museum in 2006 and set on the European route of the founding fathers' homes, recognized with the European Heritage Label.
• Museo Per Via. A museum tracing the generations who left the plateau to sell prints, books and small art objects abroad, with the routes and trades they built laid out in detail.
• Arboreto di Pieve Tesino. Meadows, wetlands and woodland between 800 and 845 meters, crossed by a signed route of an hour and a half through alpine flora.

How to get to Pieve Tesino

Padua is about 1 h 51 min away by road.

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2. Montagnana

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

57 min from Padua · 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. Padua is about 57 min away by road.

Everything we know about Montagnana

3. Spilamberto

1 h 40 min from Padua · homes €1,250 to €1,700 a m² in the center · 12,979 people

Why visit Spilamberto

Spilamberto sits at 69 meters on the right bank of the Panaro, fifteen kilometers southeast of Modena, on the line of the ancient Via Romea that ran from northern Europe to Rome. The town is documented from 776.

The Rangoni family of Modena held it for more than 650 years, and the fortress they built still anchors the centro storico, with the medieval bell tower at the edge of the borgo holding both an archaeological museum and the headquarters of the walnut liqueur order. In 1967 a group of local enthusiasts founded the Consorteria dell'Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena here, and it still certifies the twelve- and twenty-five-year-aged DOP product through annual blind tastings.

An eighteenth-century Este road that ran from Modena to Massa leaves the town heading south, a reminder that Spilamberto has always sat at a crossing point: the old route running through it toward the north and Rome, another road departing from it toward the south, the river marking its edge. A plain town that became, almost by local initiative rather than geography, the place where a regional product got its rules written down.

What to see in Spilamberto

• Rocca Rangoni. The fortress anchors the centro storico, its walls facing onto the streets that grew up around it rather than set apart from them.
• Torrione. Medieval bell tower at the edge of the borgo, housing the Antiquarium museum and the headquarters of the Ordine del Nocino Modenese.
• Museo dell'Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale. Museum at Villa Fabriani laying out the production cycle in physical form: the cooked must, the graduated run of casks, the attic rooms where fifty years of seasoning take place.

How to get to Spilamberto

Padua is about 1 h 40 min away by road.

Everything we know about Spilamberto

4. Sasso Marconi

Best for truffle season. It belongs to the national association of truffle towns.

1 h 32 min from Padua · homes €1,700 to €2,400 a m² in the center · 14,907 people

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 was called Sasso Bolognese from 1935 until 1938, when it was renamed for Guglielmo Marconi, whose family 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.

Casa Mazzucchelli (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Antica Trattoria la Grotta dal 1918 (MICHELIN) are listed in food guides.

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

It has its own railway station. Padua is about 1 h 32 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sasso Marconi

5. Comacchio

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

1 h 43 min from Padua · homes €850 to €1,200 a m² in the center · 21,910 people

Why visit Comacchio

Comacchio sits at sea level fifty kilometers east of Ferrara and forty south of the Adriatic delta proper. The town rose near the site of Etruscan Spina, held out under Byzantine rule, then passed to the Este of Ferrara and to Papal government until unification, a succession that left the centro storico layered rather than uniform.

The brackish lagoons that surround it took shape from the fifteenth century onward, and now run as a protected area of the Po Delta park, within the UNESCO inscription of Ferrara and its Po Delta, linking the town to the wider delta rather than setting it apart. The old town itself is water-built: thirteen islets tied together by bridges, canals threading between the Loggia del Grano and the Loggiato dei Cappuccini, with the bridge acting as the hinge where the inland waterways meet the canal running out toward the sea.

What the layers of rule left behind in stone, the lagoon and the tides have kept in motion around it: a town whose center is inseparable from the water that surrounds it, built up in pieces by whoever governed it at the time.

What to see in Comacchio

• Ponte dei Trepponti. Built around 1638 by Luca Danese of Ravenna, the bridge is the meeting point of three internal canals with the canal Pallotta and the symbol most visible from the water.
• Valli di Comacchio. The lagoon opens flat to the horizon at the edge of the Po Delta, its surface broken by fishing stations and the pink of the resident flamingo colonies.
• Museo Delta Antico. Archaeological museum opened in 2017 inside the eighteenth-century Ospedale degli Infermi, with finds from the Etruscan necropolis of Spina.

How to get to Comacchio

Padua is about 1 h 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about Comacchio

6. Vignola

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

1 h 44 min from Padua · homes €1,200 to €1,800 a m² in the center · 26,170 people

Why visit Vignola

Vignola sits at 125 meters on the right bank of the Panaro, twenty-five kilometers west of Bologna and twenty south 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.

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

It has its own railway station. Padua is about 1 h 44 min away by road.

Everything we know about Vignola

7. Vicenza

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

35 min from Padua · homes €1,400 to €2,050 a m² in the center · 110,468 people

Why visit Vicenza

Vicenza is the city that made Palladio and that Palladio made. Andrea della Gondola, better known as Palladio, was a stonemason's apprentice in Vicenza in the 1520s, was renamed by his patron Trissino after the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, and spent the next 50 years building villas, palazzi and churches for the local Venetian-territory aristocracy.

The result: a 16th-century city of unprecedented architectural coherence, UNESCO-inscribed in 1994 as 'The City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto'. The greatest hits cluster inside the walls: the Basilica Palladiana on Piazza dei Signori (his first major commission, 1549; a Gothic medieval town hall wrapped in a white loggia of perfectly proportioned arches), Palazzo Chiericati (now the Pinacoteca), Loggia del Capitaniato, Palazzo Thiene, and the Teatro Olimpico, his final building (1580–1585), the world's oldest surviving indoor theater, with a permanent trompe-l'œil stage set by Scamozzi depicting 'the seven streets of Thebes' in forced perspective.

A 20-minute walk south of the centro: Villa La Rotonda (1567), the symmetrical perfect-square villa that every American state capitol and Monticello copied. Vicenza also has Venice's gold and silver: half the gold sold in Italy passes through here annually (it's Europe's largest gold-jewellery district), and Vicenzaoro is the world's biggest gold trade fair.

Plus the Veneto kitchen: baccalà alla vicentina (salt cod with milk, anchovies and onions, served over polenta), bigoli with duck ragù, the local Lessini Durello sparkling wine, and Vicenza's own asparago bianco DOP in May.

Osteria Bertoliana (Slow Food), Matteo Grandi in Basilica (L'Espresso and Gambero Rosso), FuoriModena - Cucina km 200 (Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in Vicenza

• Basilica Palladiana + Piazza dei Signori. Palladio's 1549 wrap of perfect-proportioned white arches around the medieval Palazzo della Ragione: his first major commission, the building that made his name. The rooftop terrace is open and free.
• Teatro Olimpico. Palladio's final work (1580–85) and the world's oldest surviving indoor theater. Scamozzi's permanent stage set shows 'the seven streets of Thebes' in trompe-l'œil forced perspective. They still perform here.
• Villa Capra 'La Rotonda'. The perfectly symmetrical 1567 villa on a hilltop 2 km south: a square plan with four identical pedimented porticoes, copied by Jefferson at Monticello and every state capitol in America.

How to get to Vicenza

It has its own railway station. Padua is about 35 min away by road.

Everything we know about Vicenza