The 8 best towns you can reach by train that have a serious restaurant in Lazio

1. Arpino

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

1 h 34 min from Latina · homes €360 to €485 a m² in the center · 6,572 people

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 is traditionally placed at the abbey of San Domenico, where the Fibreno meets the Liri, a little north of 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.

Mingone (MICHELIN) and La Perla (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

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, a corbelled ogival arch often described as the only one of its kind 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

It has its own railway station. Latina is about 1 h 34 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Arpino

2. Castel Gandolfo

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

35 min from Rome · homes €1,600 to €2,400 a m² in the center · 8,543 people

Why visit Castel Gandolfo

The town sits at 426 meters on the rim of the Lake Albano crater, twenty-five kilometers southeast of Rome among the Castelli Romani. It stands on the site of Alba Longa, the city Aeneas's son Ascanius is said to have founded.

The lake below was formed by the fusion of two volcanic craters and reaches 170 meters deep. The Villa Barberini stands adjacent to the palace, acquired by Taddeo Barberini in 1631, its gardens running down toward the water.

Pope Francis kept the palace as a museum after 2016; Leo XIV restored it to residential use in June 2025 and resides in the Villa Barberini next door, while the Borgo Laudato Si', created by Francis in 2023, carries ecological education across 55 hectares of the same estate. A town built on legend, given over for a time to public viewing, and returned to private residence: three uses of the same ground, laid one on top of the other without erasing what came before.

Tinello Bistrot (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Antico Ristorante Pagnanelli (MICHELIN) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Castel Gandolfo

• Palazzo Apostolico. The palace Carlo Maderno raised between 1623 and 1626 stood open as a museum from 2016, its rooms given over to display cases and visitors. In June 2025 it returned to residential use, the museum arrangement dismantled to make way for a household again.
• Ville Pontificie e Giardini Barberini. Fifty-five hectares of papal villas and gardens running down to Lake Albano, with the seventeenth-century Villa Barberini at their center.
• Lago Albano. The crater lake sits at 293 meters above sea level and covers five square kilometers, its rim shared between this town and Albano Laziale.

How to get to Castel Gandolfo

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 35 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Castel Gandolfo

3. Ariccia

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

41 min from Rome · homes €1,000 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 17,917 people

Why visit Ariccia

Ariccia sits on the rim of the Alban Hills volcanic complex, and the crater geography organizes everything about the place. The town center occupies the ridge; below it on the eastern side the ground drops into the deep crater valley of Vallericcia, crossed by the viaduct linking the town to the next ridge.

The gorge itself became notorious after a series of suicides in the 1990s, now blocked with high railings. Further east and below, the volcanic lakes and the papal estate sit in a cluster within a few kilometers of the town center, part of the same crater system that shaped Ariccia's position in the first place.

The Roman past predates the Baroque town by centuries: Aricia was the first stage out of Rome on the original Via Appia, laid out in 312 BC, and the neighbouring lake was the site of the Latin League's federal sanctuary of Diana Aricina. The porchetta tradition is separate again: whole pork loin, deboned and seasoned with rosemary, garlic, pepper and wild fennel, slow-roasted on rotating spits in wood-fired ovens and served at room temperature in panini or by the etto.

The fraschette that serve it were originally outdoor wine vendors, marked with frasche, branches, as signs, and the town's status as a Città del Vino within the Frascati zone explains why the wine on the table is local rather than incidental. What makes Ariccia distinct among the Castelli towns is that these layers, Roman road terminus, crater rim settlement, unified Baroque set piece, and porchetta town, sit on top of each other in one small place rather than being scattered across the region.

Sintesi is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Ariccia

• Palazzo Chigi + Piazza di Corte (Bernini). The Chigi family's Baroque summer residence. The palazzo, the piazza and the church facing it were designed as one ensemble. The palazzo is preserved as a 17th-c interior museum.
• Santa Maria dell'Assunzione (Bernini). Bernini's circular church, domed and modelled on the Pantheon: small, perfect, often empty.
• Ponte Monumentale. 1854 triple-tier viaduct spanning the Vallericcia crater. Walk across for the panoramic view; the gorge below is wooded and undeveloped.

How to get to Ariccia

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 41 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Ariccia

4. 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.

Namo Ristobottega is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

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

5. Fondi

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

1 h 10 min from Latina · homes €1,300 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 39,916 people

Why visit Fondi

Fondi sits in the middle of its own plain, the Piana di Fondi, a fertile basin between the Ausoni and Aurunci mountains halfway between Rome and Naples, with the Tyrrhenian only a few kilometers south. The Via Appia ran straight through it, and the town has been here since 338 BC, when its inhabitants gained limited Roman citizenship after the Latin War.

The old walls that once ringed the settlement still show at the base of the castle in the center, and inside those same walls sits the Giudea, the former Jewish quarter, so the medieval town and the Roman one occupy the same footprint rather than sitting apart. South of the built-up center the plain gives way to the Lago di Fondi, a brackish lake cut off from the sea by a sand bar and worked for fishing rather than farming.

The fields that surround all of this now feed the Mercato Ortofrutticolo, moving millions of tons of produce a year out of a basin whose flatness once made it easy to defend and now makes it easy to farm.

Da Fausto (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Riso Amaro (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Fondi

• Castello Baronale Caetani. Round towers over 30 meters high in the centro storico, raised on Roman walls that still form part of the base.
• Palazzo Caetani-Colonna. Adjoining noble residence built into the castle complex, the seat of Giulia Gonzaga's court between 1526 and 1534.
• Cattedrale di San Pietro Apostolo. Romanesque-Gothic cathedral with a 13th-century pulpit and the throne where the antipope Clement VII was elected.

How to get to Fondi

It has its own railway station. Latina is about 1 h 10 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Fondi

6. Rieti

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

39 min from Terni · homes €800 to €1,150 a m² in the center · 45,083 people

Why visit Rieti

Rieti stands on a low rise at the edge of the Piana Reatina, the plain the Romans made when they drained the Lacus Velinus and sent its water over the cliff at Marmore. Medieval walls still close one side of the centro storico, and Via Roma runs down to the Velino and the stumps of the Roman bridge that carried the Via Salaria into town.

A marker in Piazza San Rufo stands for what Rieti has claimed for centuries: the umbilicus Italiae, the center of Italy. Popes stayed here often enough to build a palace beside the cathedral, and in 1234 Gregory IX canonized Saint Dominic inside it.

Saint Francis spent long stretches in the valley, which is why it is called the Valle Santa; the sanctuaries of Fonte Colombo and La Foresta are both in the comune. Above the plain, Monte Terminillo rises to 2,217 meters and is known as Rome's mountain.

In 2021 the town offered remote workers half their rent, up to 200 euros a month, to come and live here.

Bistrot is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Rieti

• Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Romanesque outside and Baroque inside, built between 1109 and 1225 with a bell tower of 1252. Pope Gregory IX canonized Saint Dominic here in 1234.
• Palazzo Papale. The bishops' palace raised in 1283 for the papal court beside the cathedral, with a vaulted loggia at street level; it now holds part of the diocesan museum.
• Piazza San Rufo. A small square in the old town with a marker for the traditional center of Italy, the umbilicus Italiae.

How to get to Rieti

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

Everything we know about Rieti

7. Nettuno

1 h 16 min from Rome · homes €1,400 to €2,000 a m² in the center · 48,145 people

Why visit Nettuno

Nettuno is the half of the old Antium coast that kept its walls. The Borgo Medievale stands on a low spur above the beach, ringed by round towers from the 1300s, its lanes and small squares still lived in.

A short walk along the shore, Antonio da Sangallo the Elder built the Forte Sangallo for the Borgia between 1501 and 1503, when Nettuno was the fortified granary of the Lazio coast; it now holds the town's Antiquarium and the Museo dello Sbarco Alleato. That museum is here because of 22 January 1944, when Allied troops came ashore at Anzio and on the beaches running south from Nettuno to Torre Astura.

More than 7,800 American soldiers lie in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at the edge of town, and the baseball the troops taught afterwards stayed: the Steno Borghese is the largest baseball stadium in Italy. In summer the town fills from Rome for the beaches and the long evening walk on the lungomare, and the local white is Cacchione, from Bellone grapes.

La Taverna di Bacco is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Nettuno

• Borgo Medievale. The walled old town on a spur above the beach, ringed by round towers from the 1300s, with the Palazzo Baronale and the church of San Giovanni among its lanes and small squares.
• Forte Sangallo. Square fortress with four corner bastions, built between 1501 and 1503 by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder to guard the coast. It houses the Antiquarium and the Museo dello Sbarco Alleato.
• Santuario di Nostra Signora delle Grazie e Santa Maria Goretti. Passionist sanctuary at the end of the lungomare, rebuilt in 1914. The crypt holds Maria Goretti, who died in Nettuno in 1902, and the church keeps the wooden Madonna delle Grazie.

How to get to Nettuno

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h 16 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Nettuno

8. Tivoli

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

31 min from Rome · homes €1,150 to €1,650 a m² in the center · 55,115 people

Why visit Tivoli

Tivoli sits at 235 meters on the Aniene where it drops 120 meters off the Tiburtini hills, twenty-five kilometers east of Rome. The Romans called it Tibur and built it up as their summer station; the moneyed classes carried on building here for two thousand years afterward.

Two of those projects became UNESCO sites, listed separately despite standing close together. Hadrian's estate, four kilometers below town, covers 120 hectares with the remains of thirty monumental buildings the emperor built between 117 and 138 AD to recreate the architectural memories of Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor.

The Renaissance garden inside the upper town was laid out from 1550 onward for a cardinal of the Este family; its grounds carry 51 fountains powered entirely by gravity from the Aniene. The cardinal stripped much of the marble from Hadrian's estate to decorate his own grounds, so the imperial villa on the plain and the garden in the upper town are bound together by more than proximity: one was quarried to build the other.

Below them both, the Villa Gregoriana park drops into the gorge where the river was diverted in 1832 to create the 120-meter Cascata Grande. The travertine quarries that built Rome are still working in the plain below.

The upper town, the lower estate, and the gorge between them form a single continuous cut through two thousand years of building, borrowing, and quarrying around the same fall of water.

Li Somari (MICHELIN and Slow Food), NUH Osteria Contemporanea (MICHELIN), Sibilla (MICHELIN) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Tivoli

• Villa d'Este. The fountains step down the hillside in tiers, fed by nothing but gravity, so the sound of falling water carries through the whole garden. Cardinal Ippolito d'Este stripped much of the marble for it from Hadrian's villa down the hill.
• Villa Adriana. The remains of thirty monumental buildings spread across the Tiburtine plain, among them the Canopo and the Teatro Marittimo, a walled island retreat inside the larger estate.
• Villa Gregoriana. The park drops into the gorge cut by the Aniene, where the river was diverted through Monte Catillo to feed the fall below town.

How to get to Tivoli

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 31 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Tivoli