The 9 best towns that eat well in the province of Viterbo

1. Calcata

Best for a small town. 902 people live here.

1 h 6 min from Terni · homes €700 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 902 people

Why visit Calcata

Calcata sits on a tufa cliff above the Treja valley, forty kilometers north of Rome. The Anguillara family walled and castled it in the 13th century.

In 1935 the Italian government condemned the village as structurally unsafe and ordered residents to move down to the new town in the valley below. Most did.

The empty houses on the cliff were re-occupied by artists, hippies and a small bohemian community from the late 1960s onward; they cleared the alleys, opened studios and bars, and turned an officially uninhabitable village into one of Lazio's strangest functioning settlements. The Holy Foreskin relic of Jesus was kept in the parish church here from 1527, taken from the Sancta Sanctorum during the Sack of Rome, and was an active object of pilgrimage until the relic was stolen in 1983 and the Vatican suppressed its cult.

Calcata Vecchia is now a single street of workshops on a cliff edge above the Parco della Valle del Treja.

La Piazzetta is listed in Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Calcata

• Calcata Vecchia. Medieval village on a tufa cliff, condemned in 1935 and re-occupied from the 1960s by artists and craftspeople.
• Castello Anguillara. 13th-century baronial castle of the Anguillara family, partially restored, now owned by the Treja Valley park.
• Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù. Parish church that held the Holy Foreskin relic from 1527 until its theft in 1983.

How to get to Calcata

Terni is about 1 h 6 min away by road.

Everything we know about Calcata

2. Bassano in Teverina

Best for a day out from Terni. It is 36 min by car.

36 min from Terni · homes €550 to €850 a m² in the center · 1,273 people

Why visit Bassano in Teverina

Bassano in Teverina sits at 304 meters on a tufa spur on the eastern offshoots of the Cimini hills, where Lazio meets Umbria above the Tiber valley. It is one of the smaller communes in the Tuscia Viterbese: 1,273 residents on a hill above the river.

The town is built around the Torre dell'Orologio, a twenty-five-meter peperino tower with a hand-painted majolica clock from around 1700 on its face. Inside it, walled into the structure, stands the Romanesque bell tower of the older church of the Madonna dei Lumi, built around 1100 and embedded within the new tower between 1559 and 1571 by the Madruzzo family.

The inner bell tower is one of the rare Italian campanili animati, with anthropomorphic figures carved into its peperino columns. The Madonna della Quercia chapel, built 1674-1678, stands around the oak where a tile of the Madonna and Child was found.

Bassano is a Borgo più Bello and a Città della Nocciola of the Tonda Gentile Romana DOP.

Olivo Ristorante dell'Olivo Country Club is listed in Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Bassano in Teverina

• Torre dell'Orologio. Twenty-five-meter peperino tower of around 1500 with majolica clock face from 1700, built around an older Romanesque bell tower by the Madruzzo family.
• Campanile Animato (Madonna dei Lumi). Eleventh-century Romanesque bell tower walled inside the Torre dell'Orologio, with anthropomorphic figures carved into its peperino columns.
• Santuario della Madonna della Quercia. Built 1674-1678 around the oak where a tile of the Madonna and Child was found, on the road below the centro storico.

How to get to Bassano in Teverina

Terni is about 36 min away by road.

Everything we know about Bassano in Teverina

3. Capodimonte

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

1 h 14 min from Terni · homes €850 to €1,300 a m² in the center · 1,650 people

Why visit Capodimonte

Capodimonte is a 1,700-resident lakeside borgo on the southwestern shore of the lake, formed 370,000 years ago when the Vulsini volcanic complex collapsed inward. The town sits on a low peninsula that juts into the water, and the centro is built around that geography: the fortress anchors the point of land, the gardens run beside it, and the shore curves away on both sides into the pebble beaches used for swimming.

From the peninsula's tip the view opens across the water toward the larger of Bolsena's two islands, still privately owned but open for guided visits, while the smaller Isola Martana nearby is uninhabited. Capodimonte is also a Città dell'Olio, and the Tuscia hills behind the town produce a DOP Sabina-style olive oil pressed in small frantoi within 10 km.

The lake itself is deep and clean, warm enough for swimming from May to October, and bream and coregone from its water turn up on every local table. The Via Francigena pilgrimage route passes 8 km east.

The Etruscan necropolis at Vulci is 30 minutes west, and the painted tombs of Tarquinia an hour southwest, both UNESCO sites, while Civita di Bagnoregio, the dying city on its tufa pinnacle, lies 25 km north. The town's identity comes from that position on the water: a fortified point of land looking out at an island that was once its own private world, with the surrounding hills supplying the oil that still runs through the local economy.

Pepe Nero is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Capodimonte

• Palazzo Farnese (Rocca Farnese). The fortress built for Pope Paul III's family stands over formal Italian gardens, partially open for visits. Its octagonal plan is unusual among lakeside strongholds of the period.
• Isola Bisentina. Reached from the peninsula's tip, the island holds seven Renaissance chapels, a Franciscan convent and the Farnese tombs, a quiet cluster of buildings for a place that was long the only inhabited island on the lake.
• Lago di Bolsena swimming + beaches. Clean and warm from May to October, with short pebble strands on either side of the Capodimonte peninsula.

How to get to Capodimonte

Terni is about 1 h 14 min away by road.

Everything we know about Capodimonte

4. Caprarola

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

1 h 7 min from Terni · homes €500 to €750 a m² in the center · 5,157 people

Written about. No. 63. Read the letter →

Why visit Caprarola

Caprarola stands at about 510 meters on the volcanic slopes of the Cimini, six kilometers east of Lago di Vico. The town is built on a single axis that climbs from the lower village to the Villa Farnese, the pentagonal Renaissance palace that organises everything below it.

Antonio da Sangallo the Younger designed the original fortress in 1530; after Sangallo's death the work was suspended, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger reassigned it to Vignola in 1559. Vignola kept the pentagonal plan but turned it from a fortress into a Mannerist residence, with a circular colonnaded courtyard at its center, a scala regia spiraling between floors and the fresco cycles of the Zuccari brothers.

Behind the villa, the Giardini Farnese climb into the chestnut and beech woods of the Cimini. Caprarola is part of the Città della Nocciola and Città del Castagno networks, a recognition of the volcanic soils that produce both.

Trattoria del Cimino (Slow Food and MICHELIN) and Vineria Vignola Salumeria e cucina (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Caprarola

• Villa Farnese. Pentagonal Mannerist palace by Vignola, built 1559-1573 on Sangallo's earlier fortress plan, with a circular colonnaded courtyard.
• Giardini Farnese. Sixteenth-century formal garden and casino di caccia behind the villa, climbing into the chestnut woods of the Cimini.
• Lago di Vico. Volcanic crater lake at 510 meters, one of the highest of the major Italian lakes, shared with Ronciglione.

How to get to Caprarola

Terni is about 1 h 7 min away by road.

Everything we know about Caprarola

5. Ronciglione

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

1 h 4 min from Rome · homes €600 to €850 a m² in the center · 8,390 people

Written about. No. 58. Read the letter →

Why visit Ronciglione

The town stands on a tufa spur at 441 meters, five kilometers from the lake, with the Cimini hills and their hazelnut groves closing in around it on every side. The first record of it dates to 1103.

The Prefetti di Vico held it before the Farnese took it as a Duchy, and the sixteenth-century pontiff who granted the town its Carnival did so during that same passage of rule from prefects to dukes. The fortress's towers control the single natural approach to the historic center, so the medieval town and its defenses are really one structure: whoever held the towers held the road in.

Everything built afterward, the cathedral, the contrade, the Carnival itself, sits inside that same defended perimeter. What the RAI title recognized in 2023 was less a single monument than that whole arrangement still intact: a fortified approach, a walled center, and a lake and hills that have not changed shape around it.

Riva Felice is listed in Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Ronciglione

• Rocca dei Borgia (I Torrioni). Medieval fortress of the Prefects of Vico, twin round towers guarding the only natural approach to the centro storico.
• Duomo dei Santi Pietro e Caterina. Baroque cathedral of 1671, polychrome marble altar, fifteenth-century triptych by a Viterbo painter, wooden statue of San Bartolomeo.
• Lago di Vico. Volcanic lake ringed by the Cimini hills, its waters filling the crater below the level of the town on its spur.

How to get to Ronciglione

Rome is about 1 h 4 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Ronciglione

6. Tarquinia

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

1 h 17 min from Rome · homes €1,200 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 15,856 people

Written about. No. 68. Read the letter →

Why visit Tarquinia

Tarquinia sits on a plateau at 133 meters above the Maremma plain in northern Lazio, six kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast. The Etruscan city of Tarquinii stood on the adjacent Colle della Civita and was one of the twelve great Etruscan capitals, ringed in the fourth century BC by about eight kilometers of walls in blocks of local stone.

What survives above ground is mostly medieval: the present town grew here in the Middle Ages as Corneto, became Corneto Tarquinia in 1872 and took the ancient name alone in 1922. What survives below ground is what made the place a UNESCO site in 2004.

The Monterozzi necropolis on the hill east of town holds 6,000 rock-cut tombs from the seventh century BC onward, and around two hundred of them carry painted interiors. The frescoed banquets, dancers, hunters and musicians inside Tarquinia's tombs form one of the largest bodies of Etruscan painting to survive.

The Palazzo Vitelleschi in the upper town houses the national museum and the Winged Horses terracottas.

Namo Ristobottega is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Tarquinia

• Necropoli dei Monterozzi. UNESCO Etruscan necropolis on the hill east of the medieval town, 6,000 rock-cut tombs with around 200 painted interiors from the 7th century BC onward.
• Museo Archeologico Nazionale Tarquiniense. Housed in the 15th-century Palazzo Vitelleschi, with Etruscan sarcophagi, painted slabs and the famous Cavalli Alati terracottas.
• Palazzo Vitelleschi. Early Renaissance palace built between 1436 and 1439 for Cardinal Vitelleschi, blending Gothic and Renaissance elements in a single façade.

How to get to Tarquinia

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 17 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Tarquinia

7. Viterbo

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

58 min from Terni · homes €800 to €1,250 a m² in the center · 66,393 people

Written about. No. 66. Read the letter →

Why visit Viterbo

Viterbo sits at 326 meters in the Tuscia, surrounded by the volcanic Cimini hills and the thermal springs the Etruscans and Romans already used. The city became the favorite papal residence under Eugene III in the twelfth century; between 1257 and 1281, five popes were elected here, and the conclave of 1268-1271 ran nearly three years, the longest in Church history.

To end it, the city's people locked the cardinals inside the Palazzo dei Papi, tore the roof off, and reduced their rations. The decisive conclave is still the reason the word means a place under lock and key.

The San Pellegrino quarter, often called one of the largest intact medieval districts in Italy, is lined with profferli, the external stone staircases that climb to first-floor doorways. The Terme dei Papi outside the walls still draws sulfur-water bathers.

On 3 September the Macchina di Santa Rosa, a thirty-meter illuminated tower weighing five tons, is carried through the streets by a hundred Facchini, a tradition listed by UNESCO since 2013.

Il Casaletto (Slow Food and Gambero Rosso), Bistrot (Gambero Rosso) and Osteria del Vecchio Orologio (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Viterbo

• Palazzo dei Papi. Thirteenth-century papal palace with Gothic loggia and the Sala del Conclave, where the 1268-1271 conclave ran for nearly three years.
• Quartiere San Pellegrino. Well-preserved medieval quarter, often called one of the largest in Italy, with stone profferli staircases, towers and the Piazza San Pellegrino.
• Terme dei Papi. Thermal complex outside the walls, fed by sulfur springs used since Etruscan times and named for the medieval popes.

How to get to Viterbo

It has its own railway station. Terni is about 58 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Viterbo

8. Acquapendente

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

1 h 36 min from Terni · homes €500 to €750 a m² in the center · 5,225 people

Why visit Acquapendente

Acquapendente sits at the northern edge of Lazio, where the Paglia river marks the boundary with Tuscany. The name first appears in a document of Emperor Otto I dated 964, taken from the small waterfalls that drop the river toward the plain.

The town grew up along the pilgrim road that runs north to south through it, and the church at its center, with its Romanesque crypt and sacellum copying the tomb in Jerusalem, gave the settlement its old nickname, the Green Jerusalem. The built-up center holds the basilica and the streets that carry the floral mosaics each May, while outward from it the town's territory stretches to two very different edges: the frazione of Torre Alfina to the north, with its own restored castle and a listing among the country's most beautiful villages, and the forest of the Monte Rufeno reserve beyond that, nearly 3,000 hectares of oak and beech reached by marked trails.

A river border, a pilgrim route, and a nickname earned by a copied tomb: together they describe a town shaped less by what it produced than by what passed through it and what was built to receive those travelers.

La Parolina is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and L'Espresso's restaurant guide.

What to see in Acquapendente

• Basilica Concattedrale del Santo Sepolcro. Twenty-four columns divide the crypt into nine naves. The sacellum sits carved into the rock at the center, a form pilgrims would have recognized as a copy of the tomb it names.
• Pugnaloni. Panels built from flower petals pressed into wooden frames, carried through the streets by each quarter of the town on the third Sunday of May.
• Castello di Torre Alfina. Neo-Gothic restored fortress in the frazione of Torre Alfina, itself listed among I Borghi più belli d'Italia.

How to get to Acquapendente

Terni is about 1 h 36 min away by road.

Everything we know about Acquapendente

9. Sutri

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

57 min from Rome · homes €700 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 6,707 people

Why visit Sutri

Sutri sits at 291 meters on a narrow tuff spur, fifty kilometers north of Rome on the old road linking the two. The Etruscans held it before the Romans took it in the fourth century BC, and it was among the colonies that refused further military contributions to Rome during the Second Punic War in 209 BC.

The rock-cut monuments that define the town, the arena, the temple turned sanctuary, the chamber tombs, all come from the same tuff spur the town is built on, so the stone that gives Sutri its ground is also what its Etruscan and Roman residents carved into. The high ground above, where the eighteenth-century villa and its gardens sit, looks down over that older excavated town rather than sitting apart from it.

Local tradition ties the town's beans to Charlemagne, who passed through and was supposedly relieved of an attack of gout by Sutri's variety. What the place adds up to is a settlement where the town and its excavation are the same rock: nothing was built so much as removed.

N'uovo Vino e Cucina is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Sutri

• Anfiteatro Romano. Elliptical amphitheater about forty-nine by forty meters, carved directly out of the tuff rock rather than built on it.
• Mithraeum / Madonna del Parto. Roman temple to Mithras hewn into the tuff and reused as a Marian sanctuary, accessed through the medieval rock-cut church.
• Necropoli rupestre. Etruscan necropolis with dozens of rock-cut chamber tombs in the cliff face along the Via Cassia.

How to get to Sutri

Rome is about 57 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sutri