The 6 best towns that eat well in the province of Udine

1. Sauris

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

1 h 17 min from Udine · homes €900 to €1,300 a m² in the center · 390 people

Why visit Sauris

Sauris (Zahre in the local dialect) lies at 1,212 meters in a high valley of the Carnic Alps, the second-highest commune in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The two main hamlets, Sauris di Sopra and Sauris di Sotto, were founded around the thirteenth century by Tyrolean settlers from the Pustertal; the Saurano dialect they brought with them preserves archaic features of medieval Tyrolean German, and the village has held its language island status into the present.

The Lago di Sauris, a turquoise reservoir, was completed in 1948 by the Lumiei hydroelectric dam, 136 meters high, the tallest in Italy at the time; the village of La Maina lies underwater. The Wolf family has produced Prosciutto di Sauris IGP, smoked over beech wood, since 1862; the brewery Birra di Sauris opened in 1999 and trades under the Zahre name.

The commune operates an albergo diffuso, the scattered hotel model, lodging guests in restored stone-and-larch village houses across the two settlements.

Alla Pace is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

The catch: January nights average 10 degrees below zero.

What to see in Sauris

• Lago di Sauris. Turquoise artificial reservoir completed in 1948 by the Lumiei dam, 136 meters tall, the highest in Italy at the time of construction.
• Sauris di Sopra. Upper hamlet at 1,400 meters, with the Chiesa di San Lorenzo, the oldest church in the valley, dating from the thirteenth century.
• Sauris di Sotto. Main lower hamlet at 1,212 meters, anchored by the Chiesa di Sant'Osvaldo and the original albergo diffuso restored stone houses.

How to get to Sauris

Udine is about 1 h 17 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sauris

2. Sappada

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

1 h 33 min from Udine · homes €2,200 to €3,200 a m² in the center · 1,320 people

Why visit Sappada

Sappada sits in the upper Piave valley, on the seam between Cadore, Carnia, and East Tyrol. Fifteen borgate are strung along the road between 1,250 and 1,290 meters, among them Mühlbach, Bach, and Hoffe, forming the oldest surviving German-speaking enclave south of the main Alpine ridge.

Settlers crossed the watershed from the Villgraten valley under the Patriarchate of Aquileia, and the dialect they carried is still spoken at home. The river that flows past Treviso and Venice begins as snowmelt above the village, in an enclosed basin reached by a path through pasture.

Sappada belonged to Veneto until 2017, when a referendum moved it into Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a late administrative shift for a place whose deeper affiliations run north toward East Tyrol rather than south toward the Veneto plain. The borgate hold the vernacular, the peak above the valley holds the border views, and the village below ties the two together: a mountain settlement whose language, houses, and geography all point away from the region it now belongs to on paper.

Laite (MICHELIN and L'Espresso) and Mondschein (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

The catch: January nights average 10 degrees below zero.

What to see in Sappada

• Sappada Vecchia. Cluster of borgate at the upper end of the village, with seventeenth-century larch-wood houses on stone bases, the best-preserved East Tyrolean vernacular.
• Sorgenti del Piave. An hour's walk up the Val Sesis through pasture and a small votive chapel, ending at the enclosed basin where the river surfaces.
• Monte Peralba. 2,694-meter peak above the Val Sesis, with via ferrata routes, a Franz Joseph chapel near the summit, and views into Austria and Cadore.

How to get to Sappada

Udine is about 1 h 33 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sappada

3. Marano Lagunare

Best for everyday life on foot. Eight of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

43 min from Udine · homes €800 to €1,100 a m² in the center · 1,674 people

Why visit Marano Lagunare

Marano Lagunare sits on a single fingertip of land at the mouth of the Stella river, surrounded by the Laguna di Marano and Grado: the largest lagoon in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The town was a Roman port, Maranum, mentioned by Pliny, then a fishing town under the Patriarchate of Aquileia, then a fortified Venetian outpost from 1420 until the fall of the Republic in 1797.

Each layer left its mark on the same small footprint: the Roman-era estuary settlement, the Aquileian fishing economy that still runs the harbor, and the Venetian grid of houses and watchtower around the piazza. The fleet and the lagoon are the same fact seen from two sides.

The moeche harvest, the schie shrimp, and the daily catch move directly from boat to osteria, and the dialect spoken in the streets is a pocket of Venetian speech that outlasted the Republic itself, holding on in a region that speaks Friulian. The town's whole history reads as a single settlement repeatedly absorbed by larger powers, Roman, Aquileian, Venetian, without ever losing the lagoon that defines its geography and its economy alike.

Alla Laguna - Vedova Raddi (MICHELIN) and Trattoria Barcaneta (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Marano Lagunare

• Porto e centro storico. Pastel-coloured fishermen's houses in a tight grid around a single piazza, with the watchtower anchoring the harbor where the fleet still ties up.
• Laguna di Marano. Moeche soft-shell crab harvest runs spring and autumn, alongside daily fishing. Small-boat tours reach the casoni, traditional thatched fishermen's huts on the lagoon islands.
• Riserva Naturale Foci dello Stella. Natura 2000 wetland at the Stella river estuary, reachable by short boat hop from the harbor. Reedbeds, birding hides, herons and migratory waterfowl.

How to get to Marano Lagunare

Udine is about 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about Marano Lagunare

4. Fagagna

Best for a day out from Udine. It is 20 min by car.

20 min from Udine · homes €870 to €1,150 a m² in the center · 6,048 people

Why visit Fagagna

Fagagna, Friulian Feagne, sits at 177 meters on the morainic hills thirteen kilometers northwest of Udine. The hill has been strategic since Roman times, and the castle passed to the Patriarch Rodoaldus as part of the 983 donation.

What remains today is scattered rather than whole: a stretch of wall, the Borgo gate, the clock-tower converted into a bell tower, the ruined keep, a fourteenth-century house, and the small church tucked inside the old walls. The four boroughs, Centro, Palûd, Pic, and Riul, each keep a color and a stake in the town's identity that surfaces once a year in the piazza, and otherwise define the town's internal geography more than its street plan does.

A regional nature reserve on the edge of town gives Fagagna a second, unrelated distinction alongside its medieval fragments. The town has been a member of Borghi più belli d'Italia since 2007.

Between the broken castle, the annual race, and the ibis reserve, the town reads less as one attraction than as several small, unconnected reasons to stop, each surviving on its own terms.

San Michele is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Fagagna

• Castello di Fagagna. What survives is fragmentary: wall fragments, the Borgo gate, and the clock-tower, the visible remnant of the donated fortress.
• Chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo. Small castle chapel inside the original walls, one of the surviving medieval structures from the patriarchal period.
• Oasi dei Quadris. Regional wetland reserve where the ibis colony nests and feeds, set in the countryside outside the built-up center.

How to get to Fagagna

Udine is about 20 min away by road.

Everything we know about Fagagna

5. Cividale del Friuli

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

26 min from Udine · homes €1,100 to €1,450 a m² in the center · 10,755 people

Why visit Cividale del Friuli

Cividale del Friuli sits at 138 meters on the right bank of the Natisone, fifteen kilometers from Udine and close enough to the Slovenian border that the river marks it. Julius Caesar founded the place as Forum Iulii in the first century BC, the name that eventually gave Friuli its own.

In 568 the Lombard king Alboin made it the capital of his first Italian duchy, and the Patriarchate of Aquileia later moved its seat here for four centuries. The Tempietto Longobardo, an eighth-century palatine chapel, holds six stucco female saints carved around 760, the best-preserved sculpture of the Lombard age in Europe.

It is one of seven sites in the UNESCO serial nomination Longobardi in Italia. The Ponte del Diavolo, begun in 1442, spans the Natisone gorge in two asymmetrical arches.

The Palio di San Donato fills the streets in late August, and Mittelfest brings Central European theater and music to the piazzas every July.

Al Monastero is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Cividale del Friuli

• Tempietto Longobardo. Eighth-century palatine chapel in the Monastero di Santa Maria in Valle, with six stucco female saints in high relief, UNESCO-listed since 2011.
• Ponte del Diavolo. Stone bridge over the Natisone gorge, begun in 1442 on two asymmetrical arches resting on a central rock outcrop.
• Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta. Fifteenth-century cathedral with the Pala di Pellegrino II, a twelfth-century gilded silver altarpiece, and an attached Museo Cristiano.

How to get to Cividale del Friuli

It has its own railway station. Udine is about 26 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Cividale del Friuli

6. Udine

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

homes €850 to €2,200 a m² in the center · 98,279 people

Why visit Udine

Udine sits at 113 meters in the center of the Friulian plain, raised on a single man-made hill that legend assigns to Attila's army. The city is documented from 983, when Emperor Otto II donated the castle to the Patriarchs of Aquileia.

In the thirteenth century the patriarchs moved their residence here, and for nearly two centuries Udine served as capital of the Patria del Friuli before Venice took the city in 1420 and governed it until 1797. The hill and the square below it still read as two distinct centers: the castle above, rebuilt after the 1511 earthquake, looking down on the civic and religious cluster of the Piazza della Libertà, the Duomo, and the patriarchs' palace.

From May 1915 to October 1917 the city was the seat of the Italian military command and was nicknamed Capitale della Guerra. A town built twice over as a seat of power, first ecclesiastical, then military, with its hill as the constant.

Trattoria Alla Vedova (Locali Storici), Agli Amici (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Hostaria alla Tavernetta (MICHELIN) and 4 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Udine

• Piazza della Libertà. Framed by the Loggia del Lionello of 1448, the Porticato di San Giovanni, and a clock tower with copper Mori that strike the hour above the square.
• Castello di Udine. Rebuilt in the sixteenth century after the 1511 earthquake, former seat of the Patriarchs of Aquileia and then of the Venetian governors, now housing civic museums on the hill above the city.
• Galleria del Tiepolo (Palazzo Patriarcale). The frescoes here were painted for the Patriarch Dionisio Dolfin; Giambattista Tiepolo's rooms are reached through the palace's staircase and galleries, the setting as much a part of the work as the ceilings themselves.

How to get to Udine

It has its own railway station. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Udine