The 10 best towns that eat well within an hour of Florence

1. Loro Ciuffenna

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

46 min from Florence · homes €1,200 to €1,550 a m² in the center · 5,914 people

Why visit Loro Ciuffenna

Loro Ciuffenna sits at 330 meters on the western slopes of the Pratomagno, between the Arno valley and the Casentino. The torrent it is named for cuts through the centro storico under a hump-backed stone bridge of Roman origin, remodeled in the Middle Ages.

A water mill on the bank is still in operation, the oldest active mill in Tuscany, dating to the 12th century and used until recently to grind chestnuts into flour. The inhabitants of the castle of Loro were the first to submit to the Florentine Republic in 1306, and the village formed its own statutes as an autonomous comune in 1462.

Two kilometers up the Setteponti road stands the Pieve di San Pietro a Gropina, one of the great Romanesque parish churches of Tuscany, built around the year 1000 over two earlier churches; its circular pulpit, supported by two knotted Lombard columns, is 8th century.

Il Cipresso - Da Cioni (MICHELIN), Osteria del Borro (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Casa e Ciliegie (Slow Food and Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Loro Ciuffenna

• Pieve di San Pietro a Gropina. Romanesque parish church 2 km south of the village, built around 1000 over a 5th-century church and an 8th-century Lombard one with a knotted-column pulpit.
• Ponte sul Ciuffenna. Hump-backed stone bridge of Roman origin crossing the torrent in the centro storico, heavily remodeled in the medieval period.
• Mulino di Loro Ciuffenna. 12th-century water mill on the Ciuffenna, the oldest active mill in Tuscany, traditionally used to grind chestnut flour.

How to get to Loro Ciuffenna

Florence is about 46 min away by road.

Everything we know about Loro Ciuffenna

2. Cerreto Guidi

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

50 min from Florence · homes €1,000 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 10,663 people

Why visit Cerreto Guidi

Cerreto Guidi sits at 123 meters above the Padule di Fucecchio, thirty kilometers west of Florence, on the old hunting grounds of the Counts Guidi and later the Medici. Cosimo I commissioned the Villa Medicea here between 1564 and 1567 as a hunting lodge and territorial outpost over the marsh.

The villa is mounted on a scenographic base of four symmetrical ramps of stairs, the ponti medicei, traditionally attributed to Bernardo Buontalenti, designed to raise the perspective plane and the level of the entrance. In 2013 the villa entered the UNESCO list of Medici Villas and Gardens of Tuscany along with twelve others, and it remains one of the few permanently open as a museum, housing the Museo Storico della Caccia e del Territorio since 2002.

The Via Francigena passes a few kilometers south. Isabella de' Medici, daughter of Cosimo I, was strangled in this villa by her husband Paolo Giordano Orsini in July 1576.

PS Ristorante is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Cerreto Guidi

• Villa Medicea di Cerreto Guidi. Hunting villa built for Cosimo I de' Medici between 1564 and 1567, UNESCO World Heritage since 2013, holding the Museo Storico della Caccia.
• Ponti Medicei. Four symmetric ramps of stairs attributed to Buontalenti, supporting the villa above the village and forming its scenographic base.
• Museo Storico della Caccia e del Territorio. Hunting and local history museum housed in the villa since 2002, with weapons, prints and documents from the Medici hunting grounds.

How to get to Cerreto Guidi

Florence is about 50 min away by road.

Everything we know about Cerreto Guidi

3. Barberino di Mugello

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

43 min from Florence · homes €1,300 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 10,939 people

Why visit Barberino di Mugello

Barberino di Mugello sits at 272 meters in the upper Sieve valley, twenty-five kilometers north of Florence, the road and rail gateway from the city to the Mugello and onward to Bologna across the Apennines. The Medici family had its roots in this territory: Cosimo the Elder commissioned Michelozzo around 1451 to transform the medieval castle at Cafaggiolo into a country villa, the first in the Medici building campaign that would later run through Poggio a Caiano and Cerreto Guidi.

In 2013 Villa di Cafaggiolo and the nearby Villa del Trebbio joined eleven other Medici properties on the UNESCO list. Michelozzo's hand also shows on the fifteenth-century loggia in the main piazza of Barberino.

South of the town lies the Lago di Bilancino, an artificial reservoir completed in 1999, the largest in Tuscany at five square kilometers, built to feed the water supply of Florence, Prato and Pistoia, and now used for sailing, windsurfing and birdwatching.

Da Alberto is listed in Slow Food's Osterie d'Italia.

What to see in Barberino di Mugello

• Villa Medicea di Cafaggiolo. Medieval castle transformed into a country villa by Michelozzo around 1451 for Cosimo the Elder, UNESCO World Heritage since 2013.
• Villa Medicea del Trebbio. Smaller medieval Medici castle on a wooded hilltop near San Piero a Sieve, also inscribed on the UNESCO list of Medici Villas in 2013.
• Lago di Bilancino. Artificial reservoir completed in 1999, five square kilometers, the largest in Tuscany, built to supply Florence, Prato and Pistoia.

How to get to Barberino di Mugello

Florence is about 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about Barberino di Mugello

4. Monteriggioni

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

59 min from Florence · homes €1,500 to €2,250 a m² in the center · 9,950 people

Written about. No. 33. Read the letter →

Why visit Monteriggioni

Monteriggioni sits at 274 meters on a natural hillock between Firenze and Siena, eleven kilometers from the Sienese gates. The walls were built between 1213 and 1219, when Siena ran them up as a frontline garrison facing Florentine expansion north.

They are still there. Fourteen square towers, 570 meters of curtain wall, ten meters tall, two gates: Porta Fiorentina to the north, Porta Romana to the south.

Dante used the towers in Inferno XXXI as the image for the giants ringing the central pit of Hell. The fortress was never breached by storm.

Inside, the village is a single irregular Piazza Roma, a Romanesque parish church of Santa Maria Assunta, a few streets that take fifteen minutes to walk end to end. The Via Francigena runs past the southern wall.

The town hosts a medieval festival in early July, when the population inside the walls multiplies for a weekend. The rest of the year, the silence inside the gates is the point.

Futura Osteria (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Osteria Bottega dell'Abate (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Monteriggioni

• Mura di Monteriggioni. Circular 570-meter wall built 1213-1219 by the Sienese, fourteen square towers on equidistant bases, ten meters high, intact.
• Piazza Roma. Single main square inside the walls, ringed by stone houses, with the Romanesque parish church on the north side.
• Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. Romanesque parish church on Piazza Roma, plain stone façade, single nave, the only significant religious building inside the walls.

How to get to Monteriggioni

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 59 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Monteriggioni

5. Greve in Chianti

Best for Chianti Classico DOCG. The town gives its name to Chianti Classico DOCG.

44 min from Florence · homes €1,500 to €2,100 a m² in the center · 13,381 people

Written about. No. 32. Read the letter →

Why visit Greve in Chianti

Greve sits at 236 meters in the Val di Greve, thirty-one kilometers south of Firenze and forty-two north of Siena, on the small fast river that gave the town its name. The valley narrows here enough that the road to Firenze runs past the castle estates on the slopes to the north before dropping into the town itself, and the walled hamlet above Greve looks down on the piazza from its kilometer of higher ground, a settlement some centuries older than the square below it, its tenth-century walls predating the piazza's sixteenth-century arcades.

The piazza is the point around which the rest of the town organizes itself: shops and a market under the arcades, a rebuilt church closing its south end, and the roads out toward the castles and the hamlet all beginning at its edges. The Saturday market fills the piazza.

The wine festival in early September empties the surrounding cellars into glasses for three days. What holds the place together is the geography more than any single monument: a market town at a river crossing, ringed by the vineyard slopes and the older hill settlement that all feed into the same triangular square.

Enoteca Baldi (Gambero Rosso), Castello Vicchiomaggio (Gambero Rosso), Officina della Bistecca (Gambero Rosso) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Greve in Chianti

• Piazza Matteotti. The arcades shelter wine shops, butchers and pasticcerie, wrapped around the irregular triangle of paving with the navigator's bronze figure watching the center.
• Chiesa di Santa Croce. Neoclassical parish church on the south point of the piazza, rebuilt in the nineteenth century after earthquake damage.
• Castello di Verrazzano. Vineyard estate on the hills north of town, producing Chianti Classico on slopes tied to the family name that reached New York Bay.

How to get to Greve in Chianti

Florence is about 44 min away by road.

Everything we know about Greve in Chianti

6. Montecatini-Terme

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

46 min from Florence · homes €1,200 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 21,367 people

Written about. No. 14. Read the letter →

Why visit Montecatini-Terme

The spa town sits at 27 meters in the Valdinievole, forty kilometers west of Florence, at the foot of the hills that hold its older twin on the height above. That older settlement predates the town below it: the springs were exploited later, and the modern spa grew up on the flat ground beneath the hill village rather than around it.

The two remain connected by the red funicular, so a visitor moves between them in minutes rather than by road. Each of the four named waters treats a different complaint, drawn from the same eleven springs but separated by mineral content once they reach the surface.

The Thermal Park gathers the pavilions that were built to house this water cure, Liberty and neo-Renaissance architecture arranged as a single walled enclave rather than scattered through the town. In 2021 the UNESCO listing grouped the town with other spa towns built for the same purpose, Bath, Vichy, Baden-Baden and Karlovy Vary among them, recognition of a model of spa town that produced this particular layout: springs, park, pavilions, and a hill town kept deliberately apart from the cure below.

Caffè Storico Tettuccio (Locali Storici) and Enoteca Giovanni (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Montecatini-Terme

• Terme Tettuccio. The most famous of the thermal establishments, designed by Ugo Giovannozzi, with Liberty interiors built on the concept of the Roman baths.
• Parco Termale. Walled thermal park holding the major spa pavilions, laid out around the eleven springs that surface in the lower town.
• Funicolare di Montecatini. The two red cars carry passengers up the hill on rails laid in 1898, the ride lasting eight and a half minutes.

How to get to Montecatini-Terme

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 46 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Montecatini-Terme

7. San Miniato

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

50 min from Florence · homes €1,150 to €1,800 a m² in the center · 27,831 people

Written about. No. 23. Read the letter →

Why visit San Miniato

San Miniato runs along three hills at 150 meters above the lower Arno, halfway between Pisa and Florence. In 962, Otto I of Saxony made it one of the seats of imperial administration in central Italy; in 1218 Frederick II turned it into a tax collection point, and the brick tower he built between 1217 and 1223 still rises above the town, rebuilt in 1958 after the retreating Germans mined it in 1944.

The Via Francigena passes through. The Duomo, dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta and San Genesio, holds the asymmetrical clock tower called the Matilde.

What the town is mainly known for today comes from the woods around it. San Miniato produces roughly a quarter of Tuscany's white truffles, including a tuber of over two kilos found in 1954.

The National White Truffle Exhibition, running through the last three weekends of November, has been held in Piazza del Duomo since 1969.

Papaveri e Papere (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Pepenero (MICHELIN), Antico Ristoro Le Colombaie (Slow Food and Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in San Miniato

• Rocca di Federico II. Thirty-meter brick tower built by Frederick II between 1217 and 1223, destroyed by retreating Germans in 1944 and rebuilt in 1958.
• Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta e San Genesio. Originally Romanesque cathedral with Gothic and Renaissance additions, dedicated to two patrons, with the asymmetrical Matilde clock tower as campanile.
• Palazzo dei Vicari dell'Imperatore. Medieval palace of the imperial vicars who governed San Miniato when it was an imperial administrative seat.

How to get to San Miniato

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 50 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about San Miniato

8. Pistoia

Best for a day out from Florence. It is 39 min by car.

39 min from Florence · homes €1,400 to €1,750 a m² in the center · 88,889 people

Written about. No. 21. Read the letter →

Why visit Pistoia

Pistoia is a Tuscan provincial capital of 89,000 residents that Florence's shadow has kept under the radar, with an exceptionally intact medieval-and-Romanesque centro storico. The Piazza del Duomo sits at its center: Cattedrale di San Zeno (12th-c) with Giovanni Pisano's silver altarpiece of St James, begun 1287 with additions over the next two centuries and counted among medieval Europe's most ambitious silver works, plus the Palazzo dei Vescovi and a Romanesque campanile that started life as a Lombard watchtower.

Five minutes' walk from the square stands the hospital, in continuous use since 1277 and carrying its famous loggia frieze along fifty meters of facade. The old center's density of Romanesque and Renaissance building sits inside a wider working landscape.

The surrounding plain is covered in nursery gardens, the economic engine behind the city walls, and the Apennines rise twenty minutes to the north, holding the Abetone ski station, the Padule di Fucecchio wetland, and beech forest in the Pistoia mountains. The local table follows the same Apennine logic: castagnaccio, necci, and farro from the Garfagnana, with anise wafers arriving from the neighbouring town of Lamporecchio.

A city this size holding a silver altarpiece, a fresco-covered chapel, a Renaissance-scale terracotta frieze, and Europe's largest plant-export zone in the same short walk is what makes the Capital of Culture designation legible on the ground rather than a line on a plaque.

La Bottegaia (Slow Food and Gambero Rosso), Baldo Vino (Gambero Rosso) and Locanda del Capitano del Popolo (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Pistoia

• Piazza del Duomo (Cattedrale + Battistero + Campanile). Set-piece Romanesque square, green-and-white striped octagonal Baptistery (1338), Cattedrale di San Zeno with Pisano's silver St James altarpiece, slender bell tower from a former Lombard watchtower.
• Ospedale del Ceppo + della Robbia frieze. Working hospital since 1277. Andrea della Robbia's terracotta frieze depicting the Seven Works of Mercy runs the entire loggia, one of the great public artworks of the Renaissance.
• Cappella del Tau. Deconsecrated 14th-c church with a complete cycle of frescoes by Niccolò di Tommaso (1370s) on the Old and New Testaments. Tiny, quiet, free.

How to get to Pistoia

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 39 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Pistoia

9. Fiesole

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

24 min from Florence · homes €2,250 to €3,400 a m² in the center · 13,809 people

Why visit Fiesole

Fiesole was Viesul to the Etruscans and Faesulae to the Romans, who took it in 283 BC. Florence claimed it in 1125 and never let it go, which is the reverse of the usual order: the hill town came first, the valley city second, and the ridge has watched its own successor grow across the centuries since.

The convent that crowns the highest point sits at 345 meters. Today the town functions as the hill seat of Florentine villas, the Villa Medici among them, so the relationship between Fiesole and Florence is not just historical but residential: those with means built upward, toward the older settlement, to look down on the newer one.

Serrae Villa Fiesole (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Le Lance di Fiesole (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Fiesole

• Teatro Romano. Stone tiers set into the hillside below the cathedral, still used each summer for the Estate Fiesolana, so the seats fill for performances the way they once did in antiquity.
• Cattedrale di San Romolo. Romanesque cathedral founded in 1028, flanked by a 42-meter bell tower, with a marble altar from 1273 and two Pietro Perugino frescoes.
• Convento di San Francesco. Romanesque-Gothic Franciscan convent at the ridge's highest point, 345 meters, with cloisters and a panoramic view back over Florence.

How to get to Fiesole

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 24 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

Everything we know about Fiesole

10. Carmignano

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

39 min from Florence · homes €1,800 to €2,150 a m² in the center · 14,540 people

Why visit Carmignano

Carmignano sits at 189 meters on the Montalbano hills, twenty kilometers west of Florence and ten southwest of Prato. The commune is built from separate frazioni rather than a single center: Artimino occupies the ridge above, Comeana lies apart with its own tombs, and the town itself holds the parish church at the lower elevation.

This layout puts a Renaissance villa, a pair of seventh-century BC tombs and a working wine appellation within the same small commune without any of them sitting next to each other. The vines of the Carmignano DOCG cover the same Montalbano slopes that were occupied first by the people who built the tombs at Comeana and later by the Medici, so the landscape reads as continuous use of one hillside across the centuries rather than as separate attractions laid on top of it.

Few communes this size hold a Medici villa, a seventh-century BC necropolis and a wine appellation across three distinct frazioni, each still doing what it was built or planted for.

Da Delfina is listed in L'Espresso's restaurant guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Carmignano

• Visitazione di Pontormo. Painted for the Pinadori family and still in place in the parish church of San Michele e San Francesco, the panel hangs where it was installed, a late Mannerist work seen in the setting it was made for rather than in a museum.
• Villa Medicea La Ferdinanda. The villa sits on the ridge above Artimino, its roofline broken by the chimneys that give it its nickname, looking out over the same slopes planted with vines below.
• Tumulo di Montefortini. Monumental Etruscan tomb at Comeana from the seventh century BC, 11 meters high and 60 in diameter, with two intact chambers visited through a corridor.

How to get to Carmignano

Florence is about 39 min away by road.

Everything we know about Carmignano