Hill towns
Hill towns in Calabria
17 towns
The ridge and hilltop borghi, sitting around 400 metres. Vineyards below, one road up, walkable once you are there. Good in almost any season.
Cerchiara di Calabria
Province: Cosenza · 650 m
A village at 650 meters below a mountain rock sanctuary, with a sulphurous cave feeding the thermal springs beneath it.
Montegiordano
Province: Cosenza · 619 m
A 619-meter hill town with a hunting castle and a centro storico turned into a gallery of murals.
Saracena
Province: Cosenza · 606 m
A 606-meter Pollino borgo named for its Saracen souk and protected by Slow Food for a passito Moscato traced to the sixteenth century.
Laino Borgo
Province: Cosenza · 582 m
A village on the Lao river canyon, at the western entrance to Pollino National Park, known as Calabria's rafting capital.
Taverna
Province: Catanzaro · 530 m
A hilltown at the foot of a mountain plateau, its stone core arranged around a fifteenth-century Dominican church.
Aieta
Province: Cosenza · 524 m
An eagle's-nest village in the western Pollino, with one of the few sixteenth-century Renaissance palazzi standing in Calabria.
Aiello Calabro
Province: Cosenza · 502 m
A hilltop borgo at 502 meters in the Tyrrhenian hinterland of Cosenza, ruled for two centuries by the Cybo-Malaspina from Massa Carrara.
Mendicino
Province: Cosenza · 475 m
A silk-mill village at the foot of Monte Cocuzzo, ten kilometers from Cosenza, where water still drives the old spinning wheels.
Gerace
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 470 m
A 470-meter conglomerate rock above the Locride, holding Calabria's largest cathedral.
San Benedetto Ullano
Province: Cosenza · 460 m
An Arbëreshë village at 460 meters in the hills west of Cosenza, where the Byzantine rite is still sung.
Altomonte
Province: Cosenza · 455 m
A hill town in the Esaro valley built around the highest Gothic-Angevin church in Calabria.
Oriolo
Province: Cosenza · 450 m
A medieval borgo on a sandstone outcrop at 450 meters, on the eastern slopes of Pollino, twenty kilometers from the Ionian coast.
Stilo
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 400 m
A Byzantine hilltown on the slope below a ruined Norman ridge, home to the tenth-century Cattolica and the legendary inspiration for Campanella's City of the Sun.
Cirò
Province: Crotone · 351 m
A hill village at 351 meters above the Ionian, the historic heart of Calabria's oldest wine appellation.
Santa Severina
Province: Crotone · 326 m
A tufa-rock stone ship between the Sila and the Ionian, holding the only Byzantine baptistery still standing in Calabria.
Riace
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 300 m
A 300-meter borgo on the Locride hills, famous for the 1972 bronzes pulled from its sea and the refugee resettlement project that doubled its population.
Badolato
Province: Catanzaro · 240 m
A medieval borgo of thirteen churches at 240 meters above the Ionian, which took in 350 Kurdish refugees in 1997 and started its own slow rebirth.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Giano dell'Umbria
Province: Perugia
A hill commune between Foligno, Spoleto and Todi, anchored by a Romanesque abbey built over the tomb of a fourth-century martyr.
Assisi
Province: Perugia
A pink limestone town at 424 meters on the western flank of a mountain above the plain, the birthplace of Francis and a UNESCO site since 2000.
Servigliano
Province: Fermo
An eighteenth-century ideal city at 215 meters in the Tenna valley, rebuilt by papal commission on a 137-by-144-meter quadrangle after the old hill village collapsed.
Labro
Province: Rieti
A 355-person stone borgo at 628 meters, restored since the 1960s by a Belgian architect and his descendants.
San Nicola Arcella
Province: Cosenza
A cliff village above the Tyrrhenian Riviera dei Cedri, where a sea arch fronts a cove only reachable on foot or by boat.