The 8 best towns with a serious restaurant in the province of Trento

1. Ossana

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

1 h 13 min from Trento · homes €1,600 to €1,800 a m² in the center · 820 people

Why visit Ossana

Ossana sits at 1,003 meters in upper Val di Sole, where the Vermigliana stream joins the Noce and the road climbs to the Passo del Tonale on the border with Lombardy. The keep was probably raised in the Lombard period, long before the 1191 record that first names it, and stood over the junction of the valley route and the mountain iron mines that made it worth holding.

Its owners changed with the centuries, prince-bishops, counts, and eventually an Austrian pacifist, tracing the wider shifts of power through the Adige and Sole valleys onto one hill above the village. The village below has kept its stone houses close around that hill, small enough that the castle is never out of sight from the streets.

What the place adds up to is a settlement built and rebuilt around a single point of control, the keep watching a road that once carried ore and armies and now carries travelers over the Tonale pass.

Antica Osteria is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

The catch: January nights average 7 degrees below zero.

What to see in Ossana

• Castello di San Michele. Fortress dominating the village, restored by the Province of Trento and open as a visitable monument. It controlled the route between the Adige valley and the Brescian uplands, and the iron mines in the surrounding mountains.
• Borgo di Ossana. Compact historic center of stone houses around the castle hill, recognized as one of I Borghi più Belli d'Italia in 2022.
• Chiesa di San Vigilio. Parish church of the village, with origins in the medieval period and frescoes inside the apse, a few steps below the castle.

How to get to Ossana

Trento is about 1 h 13 min away by road.

Everything we know about Ossana

2. Canazei

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

1 h 4 min from Bolzano · homes €4,400 to €5,300 a m² in the center · 1,915 people

Why visit Canazei

Canazei sits at 1,465 meters at the head of the Val di Fassa, one of the thirty highest towns in Italy, ringed by the Marmolada, the Sella Group and the Sassolungo. The commune includes the hamlets of Alba, Gries and Penia, which run together with the central village along the upper Avisio river.

Eight in ten residents speak Ladin as their first language, part of the small Dolomitic minority recognized by the autonomous statute, and the local Folk Group preserves the costumes, music and language traditions of the valley. The Belvedere and Ciampac lifts leave from the village itself, Col Rodella rises from neighbouring Campitello, and the Marmolada cable car runs from Malga Ciapèla beyond the Fedaia Pass, all within the Dolomiti Superski circuit.

The Pordoi cable car climbs to the Terrazza delle Dolomiti at 2,950 meters for a full view of the surrounding peaks, including the Marmolada at 3,343 meters, the highest summit in the Dolomites and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2009.

Wine & Dine (MICHELIN), Alla Locanda (MICHELIN), Locanda degli Artisti Art Hotel (Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

The catch: The nearest airport, Venice Marco Polo, is 2 h 35 min away by road.

What to see in Canazei

• Marmolada. Highest summit in the Dolomites at 3,343 meters, reached by cable car from Malga Ciapèla beyond the Fedaia Pass, with the largest glacier in the Dolomites on its northern face.
• Passo Pordoi. Dolomite road pass at 2,239 meters with a cable car to Sass Pordoi at 2,950 meters, called the Terrazza delle Dolomiti for its 360-degree view.
• Belvedere Ski Area. Main winter base of Canazei, gondola-linked to the Sellaronda circuit and the lift system across the four Ladin valleys of the Sella group.

How to get to Canazei

Bolzano is about 1 h 4 min away by road.

Everything we know about Canazei

3. Moena

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

1 h 5 min from Bolzano · homes €3,400 to €4,400 a m² in the center · 2,571 people

Why visit Moena

Moena sits at 1,184 meters at the entrance to Val di Fassa, which climbs north toward Canazei and the Sella massif. To the southeast a side valley rises toward the Passo San Pellegrino and the Marmolada group, while a plateau above the village, reached by cable car, opens onto the Catinaccio, Latemar and Pale di San Martino to the south.

The village is the largest in the valley and functions as its entrance point, with the high peaks visible on three sides and the pastures of San Pellegrino working land rather than backdrop. What holds the place together is less the geography than what the two festivals and the church commemorate: a language kept alive as an everyday tongue, a costume festival built around a foreign soldier's arrival, and a painter who left and came back.

Moena reads less like a single Alpine village and more like a crossing point, between valleys, and between a local story and the outside events that keep getting folded into it.

Malga Panna (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Foresta (MICHELIN), Ostaria Tyrol (MICHELIN) and 3 more places are listed in food guides.

The catch: The nearest airport, Treviso, is 2 h 30 min away by road.

What to see in Moena

• Chiesa di San Vigilio. Parish church rebuilt across the centuries, with a gilded wooden altar by Valentino Poschiavin and 18th-century paintings by Valentino Rovisi. It also holds work by Domenico Chiocchetti.
• Chiesa di San Volfango. Small Romanesque church next to the parish, with 15th-century frescoes and a wooden Baroque ceiling carved by Giovanni Guadagnini in the 17th century.
• Museo Ladin de Fascia (sezione Moena). The Ladin cultural museum network with a Moena exhibit on local language, costume and rural life in the lower Val di Fassa.

How to get to Moena

Bolzano is about 1 h 5 min away by road.

Everything we know about Moena

4. Pinzolo

1 h 2 min from Trento · homes €3,200 to €4,000 a m² in the center · 3,088 people

Why visit Pinzolo

Val Rendena runs the length of the valley floor, separating the granite of the Adamello-Presanella to the west from the Dolomites to the east, and Pinzolo sits at its center at 770 meters. The settlement is documented from 1211 as Penzollo, a medieval community of farmers and pastoralists that kept a degree of independence from the D'Arco counts through its own village assembly, the Università.

Most of the municipal territory now falls inside the Adamello-Brenta Nature Park, the largest protected area in Trentino, which places both mountain ranges within the same administrative boundary as the town itself. Up the valley, the frazione of Madonna di Campiglio grew from a travelers' hospice into a resort, and the two settlements are now linked by gondola as well as by governance, the older farming village at the valley floor and the younger resort on the slopes above it.

Pinzolo became a ski town in the second half of the twentieth century, and the cable car climbing from its center to 2,100 meters is the physical expression of that link, carrying the town's growth up toward the peaks that have always framed it.

Grual (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Rendenèr Alpine Food (MICHELIN) and Il Gallo Cedrone dell'Hotel Bertelli (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Pinzolo

• Chiesa di San Vigilio. The church stands above the village. Its painted procession of eighteen skeleton pairs leads pope, emperor, king, beggar and child in a single line across the exterior wall, the fresco surviving in near-complete condition.
• Chiesa di Santo Stefano. Cemetery church on the edge of the village, frescoed inside and outside by the Baschenis painters with another Dance of Death cycle and scenes of saints.
• Parco Naturale Adamello-Brenta. Largest protected area in Trentino, covering most of the Pinzolo territory and including the Brenta Dolomites and the Adamello-Presanella glaciers.

How to get to Pinzolo

Trento is about 1 h 2 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pinzolo

5. Cavalese

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

48 min from Bolzano · homes €2,500 to €3,100 a m² in the center · 4,010 people

Why visit Cavalese

Cavalese sits at 1,000 meters on a south-facing terrace above the Avisio, forty kilometers northeast of Trento, the main town of the Val di Fiemme. The valley's eleven communes held their forest commons in common under the Magnifica Comunità, the self-governing body founded by the founding charter of 1111, and Cavalese has kept its seat through the Bavarian abolition of 1807 and every legal change since.

The valley floor carries the working memory of that governance: the archive of parchments, the frescoed council chambers, the bench in the open air where disputes were once judged. Above the town, the cableway to the Alpe Cermis climbs to about 2,000 meters, and the cycle path along the Avisio ties Cavalese to the other Fiemme communes strung along the valley floor from Molina up to Predazzo and on into Fassa.

Nine centuries of continuous self-rule and a valley of communes bound by a single river explain why Cavalese reads less like a single town than like the administrative floor of the whole valley.

El Molin (MICHELIN and L'Espresso) and Orso Grigio (MICHELIN) are listed in food guides.

The catch: January nights average 4 degrees below zero.

What to see in Cavalese

• Palazzo della Magnifica Comunità di Fiemme. Medieval bishop's residence enlarged in the Renaissance, seat of the community since 1810, with a picture gallery and an archive of parchments from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries.
• Pieve di Santa Maria Assunta. Parish church of Cavalese, consecrated in 1134 on an older foundation, standing beside the park where the valley's representatives once sat in judgment.
• Banco della Reson. Stone bench in the Parco della Pieve where the Scario and the Regolani of the valley communes met as an open-air assembly to judge valley disputes until 1808.

How to get to Cavalese

Bolzano is about 48 min away by road.

Everything we know about Cavalese

6. Brentonico

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

42 min from Trento · homes €1,500 to €1,700 a m² in the center · 4,141 people

Why visit Brentonico

Brentonico sits at 692 meters on a plateau between Lake Garda and the Vallagarina. The commune runs from 500 meters in the valley to over 2,000 at the ridge, an altitude range wide enough to hold a chestnut hamlet at one end and ski hamlets at the other.

Castione, the lower hamlet, faces the Adige valley and lives by its terraces. San Valentino, Polsa and San Giacomo, the upper hamlets above 1,200 meters, face the opposite way, toward pasture and snow.

Palazzo Eccheli-Baisi anchors the center and has changed hands once in a way that says something about the town: built in 1597 by mine managers, it passed in 1840 to a family of salami merchants, before ending up, in this century, as a house for fossils and for the office that manages the mountain's protected slope. That slope, and the garden set in front of the palace, both draw on the same fact: the mountain was named by European botanists for what grows on it, and the town's two conservation projects, one wild, one planted, sit on either side of the same building.

Above Crosano the ground still carries the trenches of the First World War, dug where the Austro-Hungarian line crossed the plateau. The valley below has been worked for chestnuts and the ridge above was fought over, and the palace in the center now holds the record of both.

Maso Palù is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Slow Food's Osterie d'Italia.

What to see in Brentonico

• Palazzo Eccheli-Baisi. The building's later life traces the town's own turns: sold in 1840 by the founding mine-manager family to salami merchants, it now sits open to visitors as museum and park office at once, fossils in the rooms where ore accounts were once kept.
• Giardino Botanico di Brentonico. Opened in 2005 at 690 meters, directly in front of the palace, the garden gathers native and rare Monte Baldo plants into a plot small enough to walk in an afternoon.
• Parco Naturale Locale del Monte Baldo. The protected slope is where the mountain earns its old reputation: paths through it cross the endemic flora that gave the range its name among European botanists.

How to get to Brentonico

Trento is about 42 min away by road.

Everything we know about Brentonico

7. Levico Terme

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

30 min from Trento · homes €1,900 to €2,300 a m² in the center · 8,297 people

Why visit Levico Terme

Levico Terme sits at 520 meters in the Valsugana, twenty kilometers east of Trento, between the Lagorai chain and the high plateaus of Folgaria and Lavarone. The settlement later passed under Habsburg rule and was elevated to city rank in 1894 by decree of Franz Joseph I.

The spa quarter, the park and the lake sit close together at the edge of the old center, with the fort watching all three from the hill above. The historic center, with its imperial-era villas and the parish church of Santissimo Redentore, grew up around the spa rather than the other way round: the streets follow the shape of a resort built in the space of a few decades under Austro-Hungarian rule, rather than a town that predates it.

What survives is a place whose entire layout, from park gate to lakeshore to the fort on the ridge, still reads as the imperial spa it was built to be.

Boivin is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Slow Food's Osterie d'Italia.

What to see in Levico Terme

• Parco delle Terme. Grounds laid out by Georg Ziehl around the spa buildings and the hotel, with paths shaded by mature planting where the Christmas market sets up each winter.
• Grand Hotel Imperial. Art Nouveau facade facing the park it anchors, still a working hotel after a renovation that kept its original style.
• Terme di Levico. The spa buildings that gave the town its purpose, drawing on water piped down from the mountain springs and still run as a treatment center today.

How to get to Levico Terme

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 30 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Levico Terme

8. Riva del Garda

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

47 min from Trento · homes €2,400 to €3,300 a m² in the center · 17,782 people

Why visit Riva del Garda

The town sits where the lake narrows between the Brescian shore and the cliffs of Monte Rocchetta, at 73 meters above sea level. It belonged to the Scaligeri of Verona in the fourteenth century, then to Venice, then to the Prince-Bishops of Trento, then to Austria from 1815 until 1918.

The Habsburg century left it the Mitteleuropean spa town where Kafka, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann came to write and recover. The old town and the harbor meet at Piazza III Novembre, anchored by the civic tower on one side and the water on the other, while above, the fortified tower clings to the mountain that closes the lake off to the north.

Down the shore, the gorge at Varone cuts into the territory of Tenno, a short distance from the town but a different landscape entirely, narrow and wet where the lakefront is open. The thermal Ora blows north up the lake in the afternoon and the cooler Pelèr blows south in the morning, the cycle that has made the town one of Europe's main windsurfing and sailing centers.

What holds the place together is the layering: a fortified lake port, fought over by three powers, turned into a rest cure for writers from across the continent, and now given over to wind.

Al Volt (MICHELIN), Villetta Annessa (MICHELIN), Antiche Mura (Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in Riva del Garda

• Rocca di Riva. The moated fortress stands ringed by water in the center of the old town. Inside, the MAG Museo Alto Garda holds the archaeology and picture collection built up across the centuries the building itself lived through.
• Torre Apponale. First documented in 1273, the tower carries 165 steps to a terrace over the lake, with the Anzolim weather vane turning on top.
• Chiesa dell'Inviolata. Octagonal baroque church built in 1603, with altarpieces by Palma il Giovane and a frescoed dome, commissioned by Gaudenzio Madruzzo as a pilgrimage shrine.

How to get to Riva del Garda

Trento is about 47 min away by road.

Everything we know about Riva del Garda