Region
Liguria
Liguria's 54 towns in our catalogue split across the Savona, Genova, and Imperia provinces; 28 carry the Borghi più belli d'Italia designation.
54 towns · highest: Santo Stefano d'Aveto 1,012m · smallest: Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena 130 people
54 of 54 towns
54 of 54 towns
- ✷ We've been
Ameglia
Province: La Spezia
A hilltop borgo at 89 meters above the mouth of the Magra, the Lunigiana edge of Liguria where the river meets the Gulf of Poets.
Andora
Province: Savona
A Riviera town with two faces, two kilometers of sandy beach on the Aurelia and a ruined twelfth-century castle hidden on a hill behind it.
Apricale
Province: Imperia
A medieval hill village in the Nervia Valley, named for the Latin apricus, sunny, with a tenth-century castle shaped like a lizard on the rock.
Arenzano
Province: Genova
A coastal town twenty kilometers west of Genova where two-thirds of the territory climbs into the Parco del Beigua and peaks above a thousand meters.
Badalucco
Province: Imperia
A medieval village wrapped in a bend of the Argentina torrent, with murals on its caruggi and a Slow Food bean on its terraces.
Bogliasco
Province: Genova
A fishing village on the Riviera di Levante just east of Genoa, built around a 13th-century stone bridge over the Bogliasco torrent and a tight grid of pastel-coloured houses opening onto a pebble cove.
Borgio Verezzi
Province: Savona
Two villages joined under one comune in 1933: Borgio on the coast below, Verezzi on the pink-stone hill above.
- ✷ We've been
Brugnato
Province: La Spezia
The medieval ecclesiastical capital of an inland Ligurian valley, seat of a diocese from 1133 to 1820, with a co-cathedral built over a Columban monastery.
- ✷ We've been
Camogli
Province: Genova
A fishing village on the Golfo Paradiso whose nineteenth-century fleet of a thousand white sails made it Italy's third maritime power in the Mediterranean.
Campo Ligure
Province: Genova
A Spinola borgo at 342 meters in the Stura valley north of Genova, the last working centre for gold and silver filigree in Italy.
- ✷ We've been
Castelnuovo Magra
Province: La Spezia
A ridge village on the Liguria-Tuscany border where a marquisate treaty ended decades of conflict with the bishops of Luni.
Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena
Province: Savona
A stone village of 130 residents at 420 meters, built into the southern foot of a 1,142-meter limestone outcrop.
Celle Ligure
Province: Savona
A Riviera di Ponente beach town with kilns firing since the 1600s and a ceramic on its parish church façade.
Ceriana
Province: Imperia
A medieval village at 369 meters above the Valle Armea, inland from Sanremo, built on the Roman castrum that gave it its name.
Cervo
Province: Imperia
A hilltop village on the Riviera di Ponente built by coral fishermen, named for the Roman mansio on the Via Julia Augusta.
- ✷ We've been
Chiavari
Province: Genova
The Tigullio capital between Portofino and the Cinque Terre, a 27,000-person Genoese trading town built around a thirteenth-century grid of porticoed streets.
Cipressa
Province: Imperia
A ridgeline village at 232 meters above the Riviera dei Fiori, the climb that decides the final selection of a famous cycling race and a sixteenth-century Saracen-defence tower as its summit.
Deiva Marina
Province: La Spezia
A Riviera di Levante seaside commune reachable by sea only after the 1874 railway.
Diano
Province: Imperia
A twin destination on the Riviera dei Fiori: a medieval hilltop borgo above and a beach resort below, sharing one bay and one olive valley.
Dolceacqua
Province: Imperia
A two-banked medieval village split by a single-arch bridge from 1400, the one Monet came to paint in 1884.
Finale Ligure
Province: Savona
Three boroughs on the Gulf of Genoa, a walled inland seat set back from two coastal quarters below a karst limestone circuit.
Framura
Province: La Spezia
Five hamlets between sea level and 300 meters on the Riviera di Levante, with Byzantine watchtowers built against Saracen incursions.
Laigueglia
Province: Savona
A former coral-fishing village on the Riviera di Ponente, with a curved Baroque parish church and a fishermen's grid of caruggi behind the beach.
Lavagna
Province: Genova
The Tigullio town that gave its name to slate, and its counts to a line of popes.
- ✷ We've been
Lerici
Province: La Spezia
A fishing harbour under a Pisan-Genoese castle, with the frazione of Tellaro hanging over the rocks at the commune's southern edge.
Levanto
Province: La Spezia
The sixth Cinque Terre, a beach town and Cittaslow at the gateway of the national park, with a surf break and a striped Gothic church.
Loano
Province: Savona
A Doria fief on the Savona coast where a Renaissance palace stands over a Roman mosaic, in the shadow of the mountain that shelters it.
Millesimo
Province: Savona
A fortified borgo at 429 meters, where Napoleon broke the Austro-Sardinian army in April 1796.
Moneglia
Province: Genova
A bay on the Riviera di Levante, closed by two wooded headlands.
- ✷ We've been
Monterosso al Mare
Province: La Spezia
The westernmost and largest of the five villages, where Eugenio Montale spent the childhood summers that became Ossi di seppia in 1925.
Noli
Province: Savona
The fifth Italian maritime republic from 1192 to 1797, a walled coastal town with the Romanesque basilica of San Paragorio outside its gates.
Perinaldo
Province: Imperia
A ridge village at 572 meters, birthplace of Giovanni Domenico Cassini and home to a working astronomical observatory in his name.
Pietra Ligure
Province: Savona
A Riviera di Ponente town named after the rock castle above its center, known today for one of the largest triennial flower carpets in Europe.
Pieve di Teco
Province: Imperia
A planned market town founded in 1233 in the middle Arroscia valley, with porticoed Corso Ponzoni and the second-smallest theater in Italy.
- ✷ We've been
Portofino
Province: Genova
Three hundred and fifty-five residents, the smallest municipal territory in the metropolitan area, and the harbor every superyacht in the Mediterranean wants to anchor in.
- ✷ We've been
Portovenere
Province: La Spezia
A Genoese fortress guards the western mouth of the Gulf of Poets, above the rock where a Roman temple to Venus once stood.
- ✷ We've been
Rapallo
Province: Genova
The largest town on the Tigullio gulf, twice the location of treaties that redrew borders in postwar Europe.
Recco
Province: Genova
A coastal town rebuilt from 90 percent destruction in 1943, known for IGP cheese focaccia and Pro Recco water polo.
- ✷ We've been
Riomaggiore
Province: La Spezia
The easternmost of the five villages, 1,326 people stacked above a fishing inlet, terraced vineyards climbing 250 meters straight off the sea.
Sanremo
Province: Imperia
The capital of the Italian Riviera dei Fiori: Belle Époque casino and palm-lined Lungomare on the seafront, a medieval labyrinth climbing the hill behind, and a year-round mild climate that built the original Northern European winter trade.
Santa Margherita Ligure
Province: Genova
The Tigullio town that kept its fishing port while the world drove past on the way to Portofino two kilometers further.
Santo Stefano d'Aveto
Province: Genova
Liguria's highest commune, set in the Ligurian-Emilian Apennines with a Malaspina-Doria castle and the region's only ski resort.
- ✷ We've been
Sarzana
Province: La Spezia
The unofficial capital of the Lunigiana on the Magra plain, birthplace of Pope Niccolò V.
Sassello
Province: Savona
A baroque borgo at 381 meters in the Parco del Beigua, split by a stream and known for a soft almond biscuit invented in its own kitchens.
Savona
Province: Savona
A working port city with two Della Rovere popes, a Sistine Chapel that came before the Roman one, and a fortress on the old town.
Seborga
Province: Imperia
A hilltop village at 517 meters above Bordighera that calls itself a principality, 276 residents, its own coins and stamps since 1963.
- ✷ We've been
Sestri Levante
Province: Genova
The Tigullio town of two bays, split by a peninsula where a river once silted an island to the shore.
Taggia
Province: Imperia
The Argentina valley's medieval seat above the Riviera dei Fiori, the town that gave its name to the Taggiasca olive grown across western Liguria.
Toirano
Province: Savona
A medieval village at the mouth of the Val Varatella, four kilometers inland from Loano, with karst caves holding 14,000-year-old human footprints.
Triora
Province: Imperia
The witches' village at 776 meters in the upper Valle Argentina, where the Inquisition put around 200 women on trial between 1587 and 1589.
Varazze
Province: Savona
A Ligurian shipbuilding town whose thirteenth-century friar compiled the saint lives that became the most copied book in Europe after the Bible.
Varese Ligure
Province: La Spezia
The Val di Vara's medieval seat at 358 meters, the first European municipality with ISO 14001 certification, anchor of Italy's largest organic district.
- ✷ We've been
Vernazza
Province: La Spezia
The middle village of the coast, the only one with a natural harbor, buried under four meters of mud in October 2011.
Zuccarello
Province: Savona
A 280-person medieval borgo in the Neva valley above Albenga, founded by the Marquises of Clavesana in 1248, birthplace of Ilaria del Carretto.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Cicala
Province: Catanzaro
A village of 887 people at 829 meters, founded in 1616 by farmers asking for land.
Fossombrone
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
An inland Marchigiano town on the Metauro river, layered over a Roman colony with a Renaissance ducal court rising above it.
Bagnoli del Trigno
Province: Isernia
The 'Pearl of Molise', a 637-resident borgo built into and around a massive limestone outcrop above the Trigno valley, with a medieval castle rebuilt on its summit.
Varenna
Province: Lecco
A fishing village founded in 769 on the Lecco arm of Lake Como, with a steep grid of streets falling into the water.
Rocca di Botte
Province: L'Aquila
At 750 meters on the Carseolani slopes between Abruzzo and Lazio, the birthplace of an eleventh-century hermit and a fief of the Colonna.