Designation
Città della Ceramica
25 towns across 11 regions
Browse by region
Basilicata2
Calvello
Province: Potenza · 730 m
A 730-meter ceramic town working clay since 1200, when Benedictines from Faenza brought the wheel south.
Matera
Province: Matera · 401 m
Cave dwellings carved into limestone since the Paleolithic, called the shame of Italy in the 1950s and made European Capital of Culture in 2019.
Campania4
Ariano Irpino
Province: Avellino · 788 m
The City of the Three Hills at 788 meters, where Roger II promulgated the Assizes of 1140 and majolica kilns still fire.
Calitri
Province: Avellino · 530 m
A ceramic town at 530 meters, half-emptied by the 1980 earthquake and rebuilt around an August festival of music, words and ritual.
Cerreto Sannita
Province: Benevento · 290 m
A Sannio ceramics town at 290 meters, replanned on an orthogonal grid after the 1688 earthquake leveled the old hill.
Vietri sul Mare
Province: Salerno · 80 m
The eastern end of the Amalfi Coast at 80 meters, the ceramics town since the fifteenth century, the gateway between Salerno and the cliff road.
Lazio3
Acquapendente
Province: Viterbo · 420 m
One of the northernmost towns in Lazio, at 420 meters above the Paglia, named in 964 for its waterfalls.
- Written about. No. 68.
Tarquinia
Province: Viterbo · 133 m
An Etruscan capital on a Maremma ridge whose 6,000 rock-cut tombs at Monterozzi hold one of the largest bodies of Etruscan painting to survive.
- Written about. No. 66.
Viterbo
Province: Viterbo · 326 m
The medieval capital of the Tuscia, papal seat from 1257 to 1281, when five popes were elected here, and home to the longest conclave in Church history.
Liguria2
Marche3
Ascoli Piceno
Province: Ascoli Piceno · 154 m
The travertine city at 154 meters where the Tronto meets the Castellano, capital of the Piceni and host of the Quintana joust.
Pesaro
Province: Pesaro e Urbino · 11 m
The Adriatic port at the mouth of the Foglia, founded as Roman Pisaurum in 184 BC and given to the world by Rossini in 1792.
Urbania
Province: Pesaro e Urbino · 273 m
The Montefeltro ceramics town on the upper Metauro, known as Casteldurante until Pope Urban VIII gave it his name in 1636.
Sicily3
Caltagirone
Province: Catania · 611 m
Sicily's ceramic capital at 611 meters on the Erei ridge, 142 majolica-tiled steps to Santa Maria del Monte and a Val di Noto UNESCO baroque rebuild.
Monreale
Province: Palermo · 310 m
Above the Conca d'Oro at 310 meters, the cathedral William II built between 1174 and 1182 holds 6,340 square meters of Norman mosaics.
Sciacca
Province: Agrigento · 60 m
A terraced fishing harbor on Sicily's southwestern coast, built on a spa town of the fifth century BC and a ceramics center since the fourteenth.
Umbria4
Città di Castello
Province: Perugia · 288 m
A walled town of 38,000 in the upper Tiber valley where Raphael painted his first independent commissions and the white truffle season is the year's headline food event.
Deruta
Province: Perugia · 218 m
A hill town at 218 meters on the left bank of the Tiber, the maiolica capital of central Italy since the late thirteenth century.
- Written about. No. 91.
Gubbio
Province: Perugia · 522 m
Pre-Roman Ikuvium of the Umbri, where seven bronze tablets carry the longest text of the Umbrian language.
- Written about. No. 83.
Orvieto
Province: Terni · 325 m
Etruscan Velzna on a 325-meter tufa butte, later a medieval refuge of popes.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Castellina in Chianti
Province: Siena
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.
Camerota
Province: Salerno
A Cilento hill town of 422 meters above the Costa degli Infreschi, its caves holding one of the longest prehistoric stratigraphies on the southern Tyrrhenian.
Matera
Province: Matera
Cave dwellings carved into limestone since the Paleolithic, called the shame of Italy in the 1950s and made European Capital of Culture in 2019.
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.
Capri
Province: Napoli
The 142-meter Tyrrhenian island town where Tiberius governed Rome for a decade from twelve villas above limestone cliffs.