Hill towns
Hill towns in Trentino-Alto Adige
6 towns
The ridge and hilltop borghi, sitting around 400 meters. Vineyards below, one road up, walkable once you are there. Good in almost any season.
The towns
Bressanone
Province: Bolzano · 560 m
The oldest town in Tyrol, a prince-bishopric for eight centuries at the confluence of the Eisack and Rienz, below the Plose ridge.
Levico Terme
Province: Trento · 520 m
A Habsburg spa town in the Valsugana at 520 meters, built on arsenic-iron thermal waters.
Tenno
Province: Trento · 428 m
A hillside commune above Lake Garda where a medieval stone hamlet, a turquoise lake and the northernmost olive groves in Europe sit within reach of each other.
Borgo Valsugana
Province: Trento · 380 m
The valley town built on both banks of the Brenta in lower Valsugana, with a hilltop castle above and a contemporary art project in the side valley.
Meran
Province: Bolzano · 324 m
A Habsburg spa city at 324 meters on the Passer river, palm-lined promenades below 3,000-meter peaks and the gardens where Empress Sissi spent her winters.
Rovereto
Province: Trento · 204 m
The Vallagarina city at 204 meters where a Venetian-Austrian castle holds the Italian war museum and a domed contemporary art museum holds Italy's largest collection of its kind in the Alps.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Geraci Siculo
Province: Palermo
A Madonie ridge village at 1,077 meters, capital of the Ventimiglia marquisate from 1258 and the first marquisate granted in Sicily.
Roccacasale
Province: L'Aquila
A village of 576 under the ruins of a castle blown up by Napoleon's army in 1803.
Arpino
Province: Frosinone
The Volscian-Roman hill town in the Liri valley that produced Marius and Cicero, with a pre-Roman acropolis above the modern center.
Tufo
Province: Avellino
A 250-meter Irpinia hill town on sulfur-rich limestone slopes, twenty kilometers north of Avellino.
Bernalda
Province: Matera
A 127-meter hill town between the Bradano and Basento, Francis Ford Coppola's ancestral home, holding the Magna Graecia columns of the Tavole Palatine.