By geography
Italian island towns
18 towns
Towns you reach by ferry. Small catalogue, and the getting there is most of the point.
By region
Anacapri
Province: Napoli · 275 m
The upper half of Capri, 150 meters above its famous twin.
Capri
Province: Napoli · 142 m
The 142-meter Tyrrhenian island town where Tiberius governed Rome for a decade from twelve villas above limestone cliffs.
Casamicciola Terme
Province: Napoli · 81 m
Ischia's thermal town on the flank of Monte Epomeo, levelled by the 1883 earthquake and again in 2017, rebuilt on the Gurgitello springs.
Forio
Province: Napoli · 18 m
The largest Ischia commune by area, a Tyrrhenian coastal town facing the island's only sunset.
Procida
Province: Napoli · 4 m
A four-square-kilometer Flegrean island of pastel fishing houses, the 2022 Italian Capital of Culture.
Ponza
Province: Latina · 5 m
The main island of the Pontine archipelago, a volcanic crescent 40 km off Formia with white tuff cliffs, Roman fishpond tunnels at Pilato, Cala Feola's natural pools, and a 3,200-resident borgo curving around a horseshoe harbor painted in 18th-century Bourbon-pastel.
Ventotene
Province: Latina · 18 m
The smaller of the inhabited Pontine Islands, a flat three-kilometer tuff platform southeast of Ponza.
Isole Tremiti
Province: Foggia · 116 m
An Adriatic archipelago of five islands twenty-two kilometers off the Gargano, the only Italian commune scattered across an open-sea group.
Calasetta
Province: Sulcis Iglesiente · 9 m
The Ligurian town founded by Tabarka exiles in 1770 on the northwest tip of Sant'Antioco, where Tabarchino is still spoken in the streets.
Carloforte
Province: Sulcis Iglesiente · 10 m
A Ligurian-speaking fishing town on the Isola di San Pietro, founded in 1738 by coral fishers returning from Tunisian Tabarka.
La Maddalena
Province: Gallura Nord-Est Sardegna · 19 m
The only inhabited town of a sixty-island granite archipelago between Sardinia and Corsica, and the place Giuseppe Garibaldi chose to die.
Favignana
Province: Trapani · 6 m
The largest of the Egadi Islands off western Sicily, ringed by calcarenite cliffs and flooded quarries in place of beaches, with a 19th-century tuna fishery at its center.
Lampedusa e Linosa
Province: Agrigento · 25 m
Italy's southernmost comune, three islands on the African continental shelf, closer to Tunisia than to Sicily.
Lipari
Province: Messina · 44 m
The largest Aeolian island and the only municipality that administers six of the seven, with a clifftop castle citadel rising above two harbors.
Pantelleria
Province: Trapani · 8 m
A volcanic island closer to Tunisia than Sicily, where dry-stone dammusi sit among bush-trained Zibibbo vines listed by UNESCO.
Ustica
Province: Palermo · 49 m
A volcanic island fifty-two kilometers north of Palermo with Italy's first marine protected area, lentil fields on lava, and a long memory as a prison.
Capraia Isola
Province: Livorno · 19 m
A volcanic island of 358 residents and one village, a penal colony from 1873 to 1986 and a national park since.
Isola del Giglio
Province: Grosseto · 405 m
A granite island in the Tyrrhenian Archipelago, walled village on the ridge, port below, where the Costa Concordia ran aground in January 2012.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Aquileia
Province: Udine
A village of 3,124 on a Roman capital of 100,000, where the largest paleochristian mosaic floor in the West runs under a Romanesque basilica.
Ovada
Province: Alessandria
The Monferrato town at 186 meters where the Orba meets the Stura, one of the first two Dolcetto DOC zones in Piemonte and now DOCG.
Saracena
Province: Cosenza
A 606-meter Pollino borgo named for the Saracens said to have settled it around 900 AD, and protected by Slow Food for a passito Moscato traced to the sixteenth century.
Angera
Province: Varese
A Lake Maggiore town on the southern shore, anchored by a fortified castle on a limestone spur above the water, with a museum trail running from prehistory to the medieval period along the waterfront.
Monteriggioni
Province: Siena
A circular Sienese fortress built between 1213 and 1219 on a natural hill, fourteen towers on a 570-meter wall, intact and unbroken.