The 8 best towns with a serious restaurant that eat well within 90 minutes of Trento

1. Ossana

Best for a small town. 820 people live here.

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. Limone sul Garda

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

57 min from Trento · homes €1,950 to €4,000 a m² in the center · 1,103 people

Why visit Limone sul Garda

Limone sul Garda sits on the western shore of Lake Garda at the foot of vertical limestone cliffs, the northernmost commercial lemon-growing town in the world at almost 46 degrees north. The Latin limes, meaning border, gave the place its name; the Bettoni counts gave it its industry.

From the seventeenth century, limonaie, stone-pillared greenhouses heated and covered through winter, allowed lemons to be exported to Austria, Germany, Poland and Russia. The road to Riva del Garda, the Gardesana Occidentale, was carved into the cliff and finished in 1932; until then the town reached the outside world by boat or mule track.

In 1974 a Milanese pharmacologist traced a mutant apolipoprotein, ApoA-1 Milano, to a single eighteenth-century resident, Giovanni Pomarelli. Roughly forty of his descendants in town carry the variant, which suppresses cardiovascular disease and helps a handful of residents past one hundred.

Senso Lake Garda Alfio Ghezzi is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Limone sul Garda

• Limonaia del Castèl. Restored seventeenth-century lemon greenhouse on stone pillars above the lake, demonstrating the heated wooden cover that protected the trees through winter.
• Chiesa di San Benedetto. Eighteenth-century parish church on the lake front, with a single nave and Baroque altars rebuilt over an older medieval foundation.
• Centro storico. Tight grid of stone alleys between the old harbor and the cliff, with narrow porticoes that survive from the pre-road fishing and citrus village.

How to get to Limone sul Garda

Trento is about 57 min away by road.

Everything we know about Limone sul Garda

3. Pinzolo

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

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

4. Malcesine

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

1 h 6 min from Trento · homes €3,600 to €5,400 a m² in the center · 3,526 people

Why visit Malcesine

Malcesine sits at 89 meters on the eastern shore of Lake Garda, forty kilometers northwest of Verona and immediately south of Trentino-Alto Adige. The town strings together five lakeside frazioni between Navene and Cassone, pinched between the water and the slopes of Monte Baldo, which rises to 2,218 meters behind the rooftops.

The Castello Scaligero, built by the della Scala family of Verona in the thirteenth century around an older white-stone keep, is the defining building. On 14 September 1786 Johann Wolfgang Goethe was questioned in front of it on suspicion of being an Austrian spy after drawing sketches; he later devoted several pages to the episode in Italienische Reise.

The Monte Baldo cable car, opened in 1962 and rebuilt with rotating cabins in 2002, lifts walkers and paragliders to 1,750 meters in ten minutes. Olive groves along the lower slopes carry the Garda DOP olive oil designation.

Vecchia Malcesine is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €5,400 a m².

What to see in Malcesine

• Castello Scaligero. Thirteenth-century Scaliger fortress on a rock above the lake, with an older white-stone keep, the rooms where Goethe was held briefly in 1786 and a museum on Monte Baldo flora.
• Palazzo dei Capitani. Fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo on the lakefront, residence of the Captains of the Lake during the Republic of Venice, with a lakeside loggia and gardens.
• Monte Baldo. 2,218-meter ridge behind the town, reached by a two-stage cable car with rotating cabins; the summit is a botanical reserve known since the sixteenth century as Hortus Europae.

How to get to Malcesine

Trento is about 1 h 6 min away by road.

Everything we know about Malcesine

5. Brentonico

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

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

6. Levico Terme

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

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

7. Riva del Garda

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

8. Feltre

Best for walks in a national park. Part of the comune lies in a national park.

1 h 21 min from Trento · homes €1,050 to €1,450 a m² in the center · 20,631 people

Why visit Feltre

Feltre sits at 325 meters on a hill above the Stizzon, near its confluence with the Piave, seventy kilometers north of Padova. Roman Feltria was a municipium on the Via Claudia Augusta.

The defining episode in the city's appearance came in 1510, during the War of the League of Cambrai, when troops under Maximilian I of Habsburg sacked the town after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello, burning most of it. The city rebuilt over the next sixty years, and that reconstruction shapes how its parts relate to each other still.

The upper city, the citadel built around the main square, holds the seat of civic government, the medieval keep with its views to the peaks and forests north of the city, and the church of San Rocco. Below it, the long arcaded street through the lower city carries the same sixteenth-century idiom down the hill, so the whole centro storico reads as one build rather than a patchwork of eras.

What Feltre offers, in the end, is a rare case where destruction produced coherence: a single burning followed by a single, unhurried rebuilding, and the town has looked essentially like itself ever since.

Aurora (MICHELIN) and Enoteca Contemporanea (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Feltre

• Piazza Maggiore. Main square of the upper city, at the highest point of the centro storico, surrounded by Renaissance palaces and the citadel walls.
• Palazzo della Ragione. Sixteenth-century town hall on the square with a loggia traditionally attributed to Andrea Palladio.
• Castello di Alboino. Medieval keep above the centro storico, named for the Lombard king Alboin, with views across the Piave valley to the peaks north of the city.

How to get to Feltre

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 1 h 21 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Feltre