The 6 best towns you can reach by train in the province of Viterbo

1. Oriolo Romano

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

1 h 15 min from Rome · homes €900 to €1,350 a m² in the center · 3,696 people

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.

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

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 15 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Oriolo Romano

2. Vitorchiano

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

53 min from Terni · homes €650 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 5,250 people

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 designations at once: Borghi più belli, the TCI Bandiera Arancione and 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.

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

It has its own railway station. Terni is about 53 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Vitorchiano

3. Montefiascone

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

1 h 15 min from Terni · homes €650 to €950 a m² in the center · 12,951 people

Why visit Montefiascone

The town sits on the southeastern rim of a volcanic crater, about a hundred kilometers north of Rome, with the fortress at its highest point and the rest of the settlement built down the slope from there. The basilica stands just outside the walls at the lower end of that slope, separate enough from the fortress and the cathedral that the three read as three distinct centers of the town rather than one monument with satellites.

The wine takes its name from the same twelfth-century legend that put a German bishop's prelate on the road marking inn doors, and that bishop is the one buried in the basilica below, which ties the town's best-known export to a specific grave rather than to a floating story. The pilgrim route passes through on its way between Bolsena and Viterbo, so the hill that holds a papal summer residence and a wine legend was also, and still is, a stop on a much longer walk to Rome.

What the place adds up to is a small hill town where a fortress, a two-story church, and a road to somewhere else all sit within a short walk of one another, each one a different kind of stop on the same hill.

What to see in Montefiascone

• Rocca dei Papi. The fortress walls enclose the summit; the tower stair is narrow and gives out onto the panorama at once, the water filling the whole crater rim below.
• Basilica di San Flaviano. Two churches stacked on each other, the lower nave older and darker, the upper one built two centuries later and open to more light. The frescoes are original to the walls, not restored copies, and the German bishop Johannes Defuk is buried here.
• Cattedrale di Santa Margherita. The octagonal dome is 27 meters across, third largest in Italy by base diameter, finished in the late sixteenth century. It dominates the town's roofline the way the fortress dominates its summit.

How to get to Montefiascone

It has its own railway station. Terni is about 1 h 15 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Montefiascone

4. Capranica

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

1 h 12 min from Rome · homes €650 to €950 a m² in the center · 6,341 people

Written about. No. 64. Read the letter →

Why visit Capranica

Capranica sits in the Tuscia at the fifty-fifth kilometer of the Via Cassia, on a hill overlooking the Sutri valley between Lake Bracciano and Lake Vico. The Etruscans worked this ground; the medieval borgo grew along the Cassia after the road was rebuilt in the second century BC.

The Anguillara family appeared in 1305 and held the town through most of the fourteenth century. In 1337, under Orso degli Anguillara, Francesco Petrarca stayed here on his way south, the moment local memory still attaches to the place.

Castrovecchio is the oldest quarter, a wedge of stone houses and stepped streets above the Castello degli Anguillara. The town is one of the Italian comuni crossed by the Via Francigena, with a marked stage running north toward Sutri and Vetralla.

Hazelnut groves cover the surrounding slopes; Capranica is a member of the Città della Nocciola network and supplies the Tonda Gentile Romana, the local DOP variety.

What to see in Capranica

• Castello degli Anguillara. Medieval fortress at the head of Castrovecchio, seat of the Anguillara family from 1305 and the place Petrarch stayed in 1337.
• Castrovecchio. Oldest quarter of the town, a wedge of stone houses and stepped streets rising above the Cassia toward the castle.
• Chiesa di San Francesco. Fourteenth-century Franciscan church on the edge of Castrovecchio, with fresco fragments and Anguillara family tombs.

How to get to Capranica

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 12 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Capranica

5. 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.

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

6. Viterbo

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list three tables here.

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.

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