Hill towns

Hill towns in Tuscany

40 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.

Montepulciano
Province: Siena · 605 m
A Renaissance hill town at 605 meters on a limestone ridge, aging its Sangiovese-based red in vaulted cellars beneath the palazzi.
San Casciano dei Bagni
Province: Siena · 582 m
A hilltop borgo at 582 meters above 42 hot springs that produced the largest Etruscan bronze hoard of the last fifty years.
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Castellina in Chianti
Province: Siena · 578 m
A Chianti hill town at 578 meters on the watershed between the Arno and the Ombrone, with an Etruscan tumulus, a Brunelleschi-reinforced wall and a covered medieval walkway around its edge.
Castelnuovo di Val di Cecina
Province: Pisa · 576 m
A copper and geothermal borgo at 576 meters in the Cecina valley, where natural steam vents and medieval towers sit on the same hill.
Chiusdino
Province: Siena · 564 m
A medieval village at 564 meters in the Val di Merse, above a roofless Cistercian abbey.
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Montalcino
Province: Siena · 564 m
A walled hill town at 564 meters above the Val d'Orcia, the last fortress to hold out for the Sienese Republic and the birthplace of Brunello.
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Castiglione d'Orcia
Province: Siena · 540 m
A stone borgo at 540 meters in the UNESCO Val d'Orcia, with two fortresses guarding the road from Amiata to the Via Francigena.
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Volterra
Province: Pisa · 531 m
The Etruscan acropolis of Velathri at 531 meters, the alabaster town that has been carving the same stone for three thousand years.
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Fosdinovo
Province: Massa-Carrara · 500 m
The southern Lunigiana stronghold at 500 meters, the Malaspina castle where Dante took shelter in 1306 and later set a Purgatorio canto.
Cortona
Province: Arezzo · 494 m
An Etruscan lucumonia at 494 meters, with two kilometers of walls older than Rome.
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Pienza
Province: Siena · 491 m
The first Renaissance ideal city, built from 1459 on the Val d'Orcia ridge.
Trequanda
Province: Siena · 453 m
A village of 1,166 in three hilltop borghi between Crete Senesi and Val di Chiana, with the terracotta workshops of Petroio holding to a five-hundred-year craft.
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Manciano
Province: Grosseto · 444 m
A market town at 444 meters in the southern Maremma, with a Sienese fortress of 1424 and the thermal frazione of Saturnia in its territory.
Stazzema
Province: Lucca · 440 m
A mountain commune of seventeen hamlets in the Apuan Alps, site of the August 1944 Sant'Anna massacre and Italy's National Park of Peace.
Poppi
Province: Arezzo · 437 m
The Casentino borgo at 437 meters above the field where Dante fought at Campaldino in June 1289.
Anghiari
Province: Arezzo · 430 m
A walled medieval town at 430 meters over the upper Tiber valley, where Florence beat Milan in 1440 and Leonardo started the fresco he never finished.
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Barga
Province: Lucca · 410 m
A medieval hilltop town at 410 meters in the Serchio valley, where Giovanni Pascoli wrote his last poems and the August festival serves fish and chips.
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San Quirico d'Orcia
Province: Siena · 409 m
A walled stop on the Via Francigena at 409 meters in the UNESCO Val d'Orcia, where a twelfth-century Collegiata, a Renaissance garden and the Bagno Vignoni thermal pool sit within fifteen kilometers of each other.
Lucignano
Province: Arezzo · 400 m
A walled elliptical hill town at 400 meters between Siena and Arezzo, planned in medieval concentric rings around the goldsmith's reliquary called the Tree of Life.
Chiusi
Province: Siena · 398 m
The Etruscan city of King Porsenna at 398 meters above the Val di Chiana, with one of Italy's major Etruscan museums and tunnels carved beneath the streets.
Cetona
Province: Siena · 384 m
A medieval borgo at 384 meters, sold by Cosimo I to the Vitelli in 1556 and the centro storico still shaped by their fortress reconstruction.
Massa Marittima
Province: Grosseto · 380 m
A medieval mining town at 380 meters, free commune from 1255 to 1337, whose cathedral holds the relics of San Cerbone.
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Castelnuovo Berardenga
Province: Siena · 351 m
A commune of 351 meters, the last castle Siena built against Florence, in 1366.
Mulazzo
Province: Massa-Carrara · 351 m
A Malaspina fief in the Lunigiana hills where Dante stayed in 1306, with a frazione of booksellers who walked their wares across Italy.
Castiglion Fiorentino
Province: Arezzo · 342 m
A walled hill town at 342 meters between Arezzo and Cortona, where Etruscan walls support the medieval Cassero.
Montaione
Province: Firenze · 341 m
A medieval glassmaking and truffle borgo at 341 meters above the Valdelsa, with a Franciscan replica of Jerusalem in the woods nearby.
Rapolano Terme
Province: Siena · 334 m
A Sienese thermal town of 38-degree calcium-sulphur waters and travertine quarries feeding facades beyond its borders.
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San Gimignano
Province: Siena · 334 m
A walled hill town at 334 meters with 14 surviving medieval towers, UNESCO listed since 1990 and the home of Vernaccia.
Loro Ciuffenna
Province: Arezzo · 330 m
A Valdarno village at 330 meters straddling the Ciuffenna torrent, with the oldest working water mill in Tuscany and a Lombard pulpit two kilometers up the road.
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Siena
Province: Siena · 322 m
The medieval rival of Florence at 322 meters on three hills, with a shell-shaped piazza where seventeen contrade race bareback horses twice a year.
Murlo
Province: Siena · 314 m
A medieval bishops' fief twenty kilometers south of Siena, with an Etruscan princely palace on Poggio Civitate and the Cappellone statue as its symbol.
Pitigliano
Province: Grosseto · 313 m
The Little Jerusalem of southern Tuscany, carved into a tuff spur in the Maremma, where the houses, the synagogue and the streets are all cut from the same volcanic rock.
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Arezzo
Province: Arezzo · 296 m
Tuscany's other set-piece: a 96,000-resident Etruscan-Roman-medieval hilltop city 80 km southeast of Florence.
Fiesole
Province: Firenze · 295 m
An Etruscan hilltop above Florence, still looking down on what later replaced it.
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Monteriggioni
Province: Siena · 274 m
A circular Sienese fortress built between 1213 and 1219 on a natural hill, fourteen towers on a 570-meter wall, intact and unbroken.
Barberino di Mugello
Province: Firenze · 272 m
The Mugello gateway at 272 meters where the Medici family kept its first country villas, with Michelozzo's Cafaggiolo and the artificial Lago di Bilancino below.
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Greve in Chianti
Province: Firenze · 236 m
The market town on the Greve river, with a triangular piazza arcaded since the sixteenth century.
Pontremoli
Province: Massa-Carrara · 236 m
The capital of Lunigiana at the confluence of the Magra and Verde, holding the prehistoric stele statues and the oldest book prize in Italy.
Licciana Nardi
Province: Massa-Carrara · 215 m
A Lunigiana Malaspina village at 215 meters in the Apennine Tosco-Emiliano park, named in 1933 for the Risorgimento patriot Anacarsi Nardi.
Casale Marittimo
Province: Pisa · 214 m
A concentric stone borgo at 214 meters above the Val di Cecina, built where a seventh-century BC Etruscan outpost of Volterra once stood.

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