The best towns with a food festival that you can reach by train in Lazio

Oriolo Romano

Why visit Oriolo Romano

Oriolo Romano sits at 420 meters in the Sabatini hills, between Lake Bracciano and the volcanic Cimini, not far from the old Via Clodia. The village is unusually new for the Tuscia: in 1560 the Orsini family ceded a wooded fief to the nobleman Giorgio Santacroce, who began clearing the forest and founded a planned agricultural settlement.

The first inhabitants were farmers, shepherds and woodcutters drawn from Tuscany and Umbria, so the local accent kept Umbrian inflections for generations. The palace at the center of the village gave the settlement its shape, with the parish church and the main square arranged around it as the plan intended.

The forest that once covered the whole fief survives now at the margins, an exceptionally low-altitude stand for an Apennine beech wood, while hazelnut groves have taken over the lower slopes that were cleared for farming. The village, in effect, is the cleared half of a wooded fief, its cultivated ring still framed by the wood the Santacroce family left standing.

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What to see in Oriolo Romano

• Palazzo Altieri. Sixteenth-century palace enlarged in 1674 under Pope Clement X, with Old Testament frescoes and painted views of the Altieri fiefs.
• Faggeta di Monte Raschio. Primeval beech forest of about eighty hectares between 400 and 550 meters, UNESCO World Heritage since 2017.
• Piazza Umberto I. Central square of the 1560 plan, anchored by the palace and the parish Chiesa di Sant'Anna at the head of the village.

How to get to Oriolo Romano

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 75 minutes away by road.

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Vitorchiano

Why visit Vitorchiano

Vitorchiano sits at 285 meters on a single bank of peperino. Two ravines flank the town and meet at the Vezza torrent below, which is why the old center reads as an island of dark stone with the land falling away on both sides.

The quarries below the town are still working, and Vitorchiano peperino now ships to Canada, Japan and the Middle East, so the same rock that holds up the walls and staircases overhead also travels out from underneath the town in the other direction. The statue on the ridge was carved from a single block of that local stone by sculptors who came from the other side of the world to work it, which is its own kind of trade: peperino leaving Vitorchiano to be known abroad, and a foreign hand arriving to shape what stayed.

Above the rooftops, the Belvedere gives the wider frame the streets below cannot, the Cimini hills and the Tiber valley spread out past the ravine. Vitorchiano holds three institutional signals at once: Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione TCI, Città della Nocciola.

A small town, then, defined less by any one of its parts than by how completely the stone underneath it accounts for all of them.

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What to see in Vitorchiano

• Centro storico in peperino. Medieval old town cut from a single volcanic boulder, walls and houses built in dark Vitorchiano peperino quarried below.
• Moai di Vitorchiano. Six-meter peperino statue carved in 1990 by eleven sculptors of the Atan family from Easter Island, the only true Moai outside Rapa Nui.
• Belvedere. Cliff-edge terrace at the eastern end of the borgo, view across the Vezza ravine to the Cimini hills and the Tiber valley.

How to get to Vitorchiano

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Terni is roughly 53 minutes away by road.

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Arpino

Why visit Arpino

Arpino sits at 450 meters on two hills in the Liri valley, in the Ciociaria region of southern Lazio. The ancient city of Arpinum, on the upper hill now called Civitavecchia, was a Volscian-Samnite stronghold captured by Rome in 305 BC.

The lower hill is the medieval and modern town. Two Roman consuls were born here: Gaius Marius, the military reformer who fought the Cimbri and Teutones, and Marcus Tullius Cicero, the orator and senator killed in 43 BC.

The villa where Cicero was born stood just north, on the Liri, in what is now Isola del Liri. The upper acropolis is ringed by polygonal cyclopean walls of the sixth or fifth century BC, with the Arco a Sesto Acuto, a pointed-arch gate cut into the same stone work.

Arpino is on the Bandiere Arancioni list and on the Cammino di San Benedetto, the long pilgrim route from Norcia to Montecassino.

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What to see in Arpino

• Acropoli di Civitavecchia. Pre-Roman upper city on the hill above modern Arpino, surrounded by cyclopean polygonal walls of the sixth or fifth century BC.
• Arco a Sesto Acuto. Pointed-arch gate cut into the cyclopean walls of the acropolis, the only known pre-Roman ogival arch in central Italy.
• Torre di Cicerone. Medieval tower on the acropolis, traditionally linked to Cicero by local memory though built more than a thousand years after his death.

How to get to Arpino

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Latina is roughly 94 minutes away by road.

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Anguillara Sabazia

Why visit Anguillara Sabazia

Anguillara Sabazia sits on a small volcanic cape that pushes into Lake Bracciano from the southern shore, twenty-five kilometers northwest of Rome. The medieval town climbs from the lake on stepped streets to the Porta Maggiore and the Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta at the top.

The setting is older than the medieval town: La Marmotta, a few hundred meters offshore from the cape, is one of the oldest underwater archaeological sites in Europe, an Early Neolithic lakeshore village dated to 5700 BC, with preserved wooden canoes and grain stores in the lakebed mud. The Romans came later: Rutilia Polla, a Roman patrician, owned a villa on the cape in the first century BC, and the modern town name carries the surname of the medieval Anguillara family who took the place after the empire.

Anguillara is one of three communes on Lake Bracciano with Bracciano and Trevignano, and it is the closest to Rome of the three.

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What to see in Anguillara Sabazia

• Porta Maggiore e centro storico. Medieval gate and stepped town climbing from the lakefront on the volcanic cape, with stone streets converging on the upper piazza.
• Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta. Main church at the top of the cape, rebuilt in the sixteenth century on earlier foundations, with views over the lake from the parvis.
• Lungolago e cape. Lakefront promenade and small beaches along the cape, with views east to Trevignano and west to Bracciano across the volcanic basin.

How to get to Anguillara Sabazia

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 50 minutes away by road.

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Anagni

Why visit Anagni

Anagni sits on a hilltop at 424 meters in Ciociaria, fifty-five kilometers southeast of Rome, looking over the Sacco valley and the Hernici mountains. It is one of four communes called the Città dei Papi, the others being Segni, Ferentino, and Veroli; four medieval popes were born here, Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and a fourth who would later be attacked in his own palace.

Agents of Philip IV of France, acting on his orders, stormed that palace on the hill and physically assaulted the reigning pope inside it. The centralized medieval papacy died with him within the month, and within five years the papal court had moved to Avignon.

The town's medieval fabric runs along Via Vittorio Emanuele, where the communal loggia, a frescoed church, and a house layered with nineteenth-century inscriptions sit within walking distance of each other on the same climb up from the lower town to the cathedral above. A single event inside a single palace on this hill is the reason the town's name outgrew its size: four popes were born here, but it is one pope's injury, not birth, that historians still date the end of an era to.

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What to see in Anagni

• Cattedrale di Santa Maria. Romanesque cathedral on the highest point of the hill, with Gothic additions, a campanile, and a Cosmati pavement underfoot.
• Cripta di San Magno. The crypt beneath the cathedral floor, walls covered edge to edge in painting, dim enough that the colors need a moment to settle into view.
• Palazzo di Bonifacio VIII. The papal palace where Sciarra Colonna struck Boniface VIII during the Outrage of Anagni, its thirteenth-century rooms still standing on the hill.

How to get to Anagni

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 55 minutes away by road.

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Cerveteri

Why visit Cerveteri

Cerveteri sits on a tufa outcrop at 81 meters above the coastal plain, seven kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian and thirty-five northwest of Rome. The Etruscans called it Caisra, the Greeks Agylla, the Romans Caere; at its height around 600 BC it covered fifteen times the area of the modern town and held an estimated 25,000 to 40,000 people, the equal of Tarquinia at the peak of Etruscan power.

The medieval town inherited the central plateau and was renamed Caere Vetus, the Old Caere, to distinguish it from the coastal Caere Novum that no longer exists. The Castello Ruspoli at the centre of the medieval town encloses sections of fourth-century BC Etruscan walls in its base.

Two kilometers north, the Banditaccia necropolis covers 400 hectares of which 10 are visitable, with around 1,000 rock-cut tombs and the great earth tumuli that gave Etruscan funerary architecture its most concentrated expression. It joined the UNESCO list with Tarquinia in 2004.

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What to see in Cerveteri

• Necropoli della Banditaccia. UNESCO Etruscan necropolis 2 km north of town, covering 400 hectares with around 1,000 tombs and the great earth tumuli that defined Etruscan funerary architecture.
• Museo Nazionale Cerite. National Etruscan museum inside the Castello Ruspoli, with sarcophagi, ceramics and grave goods recovered from the Banditaccia tombs.
• Castello Ruspoli. Medieval Orsini-Ruspoli fortress at the centre of the old town, with fourth-century BC Etruscan walls preserved in its base.

How to get to Cerveteri

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Roma is roughly 50 minutes away by road.

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Velletri

Why visit Velletri

The town sits at 332 meters, thirty-five kilometers from Rome, on the southeastern rim of a volcanic ring of craters and lakes. Before it was a papal possession and a diocesan seat, it was a Volscian stronghold, and before that the home ground of the Octavii, the paternal family of the man who became Augustus: Suetonius records a street here called Octavian and an altar consecrated by an Octavius, and the future emperor passed his childhood in the town under its old name, Velitrae.

That layering, Volscian settlement, imperial family seat, papal diocese, is what the center still shows once the war is accounted for: an army broke through a German defensive line here in May 1944, and much of the town was destroyed in the process. What stands now above the old piazza and around the rebuilt town hall is largely reconstruction fitted around what survived, with a wine trade going back to the volcanic soil that predates all of it.

A town whose name changed twice, whose family produced an emperor, and whose center was rebuilt from a battle line, but whose vineyards on the same slopes never stopped being the constant.

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What to see in Velletri

• Torre del Trivio. 50-meter Romanesque bell tower from the 14th century, the only structure to come through the 1944 bombing intact, still the shape by which the town is recognized from a distance.
• Palazzo Comunale. Renaissance town hall designed by Giacomo Della Porta, rebuilt after wartime damage, facing the piazza named for the emperor born to the town.
• Cattedrale di San Clemente. Cathedral seat of the suburbicarian Diocese of Velletri-Segni, a title held today by the Dean of the College of Cardinals.

How to get to Velletri

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Latina is roughly 35 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Velletri