Designation
Cittaslow
55 towns across 14 regions
Browse by region
Abruzzo6
Città Sant'Angelo
Province: Pescara · 320 m
A hilltop borgo at 320 meters between the Vestina hills and the Adriatic, named for the Archangel and known since 1352 as a Collegiata seat.
Controguerra
Province: Teramo · 267 m
A 267-meter hill village whose name is legal shorthand for a small Montepulciano and Trebbiano-Passerina DOC.
Guardiagrele
Province: Chieti · 576 m
The 576-meter terrazza d'Abruzzo on the Majella's foothills, hometown of fifteenth-century goldsmith Nicola da Guardiagrele and seat of the Majella park.
Penne
Province: Pescara · 438 m
The brick city at 438 meters between the Tavo and Fino, ancient capital of the Vestini, rebuilt after Allied bombing and awarded the Silver Medal of Civic Merit.
Pianella
Province: Pescara · 236 m
A Cittaslow hill town at 236 meters between the Tavo and Pescara rivers, anchor of the Aprutino oil triangle and home of the dritta olive.
Pineto
Province: Teramo · 4 m
A planned twentieth-century beach town named for D'Annunzio's poem, with the sixteenth-century Cerrano tower anchoring Abruzzo's first marine protected area.
Apulia3
Cisternino
Province: Brindisi · 394 m
An Itria valley borgo on the southern Murgia at 394 meters, whitewashed and looking down over drystone walls and trulli.
Gravina in Puglia
Province: Bari · 350 m
Puglia's deepest gravina: a Bari-province town of 42,700 built on the lip of a 100m-deep limestone canyon, its cliffs threaded with rupestrian cave churches.
Trani
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 7 m
The Adriatic port whose pink-white Romanesque cathedral stands on the water, built for a Greek pilgrim who died here in 1094.
Calabria2
Campania5
Amalfi
Province: Salerno · 6 m
The first Italian maritime republic and the coast it named, six meters above the sea between cliffs that close around the duomo's steps.
Caiazzo
Province: Caserta · 200 m
A Cittaslow hill above the Volturno, turned by Franco Pepe's pizza into a destination for 800 covers a day in eighteenth-century rooms.
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.
Perito
Province: Salerno · 480 m
A Cilento ridge town at 480 meters above the Alento valley, once a center of black-powder production for hunting, defense and brigands.
Positano
Province: Salerno · 30 m
The vertical village of the Amalfi Coast, terraced houses climbing four hundred meters to the Lattari ridge under a tiled Byzantine dome.
Emilia-Romagna5
Borgo Val di Taro
Province: Parma · 411 m
The Cittaslow capital of the upper Taro valley at 411 meters, where the Fungo di Borgotaro IGP porcini has been protected since 1996.
Brisighella
Province: Ravenna · 115 m
A Lamone-valley borgo at 115 meters under three selenite hills crowned by a fortress, a clock tower, and a sanctuary.
Castel San Pietro Terme
Province: Bologna · 75 m
A 75-meter thermal town east of Bologna, its sulphurous waters in use since 1137.
Fontanellato
Province: Parma · 45 m
A Parma-plain town built around the Rocca Sanvitale, the moated fortress at its center.
Santarcangelo di Romagna
Province: Rimini · 42 m
A Via Emilia hill town on the Marecchia plain, with over 150 tufa caves under the centro and a Malatesta fortress on its summit.
Lazio2
Lombardy5
Bellano
Province: Lecco · 202 m
An eastern shore town where the Pioverna cut a gorge through fifteen million years of rock before reaching the water.
Chiavenna
Province: Sondrio · 333 m
An Alpine town at 333 meters on the Mera river, the historical Splügen Pass crossroads named for its key position and its rock-cellar crotti.
Morimondo
Province: Milano · 109 m
A Cistercian abbey village on the edge of the Ticino park, twenty-five kilometers southwest of Milano, founded by French monks in 1134.
Teglio
Province: Sondrio · 856 m
A Valtellina hilltown at 856 metres whose Latin name gave the entire valley its own.
Tirano
Province: Sondrio · 441 m
A Valtellina town at 441 meters where a railway from across the border reaches Italy, beneath terraced Nebbiolo vineyards.
Tuscany11
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Abetone Cutigliano
Province: Pistoia · 1,388 m
The Apennine ski pass at 1,388 meters where the Granduca's two stone pyramids of 1778 mark the old Tuscan-Modenese border.
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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Capalbio
Province: Grosseto · 217 m
A walled hilltop borgo at 217 meters in the southern Maremma, donated to the Abbey of Tre Fontane by Charlemagne.
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Castelnuovo Berardenga
Province: Siena · 351 m
A commune of 351 meters, the last castle Siena built against Florence, in 1366.
Cortona
Province: Arezzo · 494 m
An Etruscan lucumonia at 494 meters, with two kilometers of walls older than Rome.
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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.
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.
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.
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San Miniato
Province: Pisa · 150 m
The hilltop town between Pisa and Florence that produces a quarter of Tuscany's white truffles and once held the imperial seat of Otto I.
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Suvereto
Province: Livorno · 127 m
A stone borgo at 127 meters above the Val di Cornia, named for the cork oaks of its forests and ruled from the Rocca Aldobrandesca since 973.
Umbria9
Amelia
Province: Terni · 406 m
A pre-Roman hilltown ringed by polygonal walls, with ten barrel-vaulted Roman cisterns beneath its main square.
Città della Pieve
Province: Perugia · 508 m
A red-brick hill town at 508 meters above the Valdichiana, the birthplace of Perugino and the home of Italy's narrowest alley.
Monte Castello di Vibio
Province: Perugia · 422 m
A fifteenth-century walled village at 422 meters above the Tiber, home to the world's smallest all'italiana theatre with 99 seats.
Montefalco
Province: Perugia · 472 m
The hilltop wine capital of Umbria at 472 meters, where Sagrantino is grown almost nowhere else.
Norcia
Province: Perugia · 604 m
Birthplace of San Benedetto at 604 meters on a Sibillini plateau, leveled by the 2016 earthquake and rebuilt stone by stone.
Orvieto
Province: Terni · 325 m
Etruscan Velzna on a 325-meter tufa butte, later a medieval refuge of popes.
Preci
Province: Perugia · 596 m
A walled Valnerina village at 596 meters that ran Europe's leading school of surgery for three centuries until the 2016 quake brought the borgo down.
Todi
Province: Perugia · 398 m
A walled hill town at 398 meters on the Tiber, with Etruscan, Roman, and medieval rings stacked one above the other.
Trevi
Province: Perugia · 412 m
A walled town at 412 meters above the Spoleto valley, ringed by 200,000 olive trees that make it the Umbrian capital of olive oil.
Veneto3
Asolo
Province: Treviso · 205 m
A walled hill town at 205 meters that Caterina Cornaro ran as her court after trading Cyprus to Venice in 1489.
Farra di Soligo
Province: Treviso · 161 m
An 8,477-resident comune in the Conegliano-Valdobbiadene DOCG zone, with the three medieval Torri di Credazzo crowning a hilltop above its vineyards and Cittaslow plus Città del Vino status alongside it.
Follina
Province: Treviso · 191 m
A Prosecco-hills borgo at 191 meters around the Cistercian Abbey of Santa Maria, with a cloister finished in 1268.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Giano dell'Umbria
Province: Perugia
A hill commune between Foligno, Spoleto and Todi, anchored by a Romanesque abbey built over the tomb of a fourth-century martyr.
Assisi
Province: Perugia
A pink limestone town at 424 meters on the western flank of a mountain above the plain, the birthplace of Francis and a UNESCO site since 2000.
Servigliano
Province: Fermo
An eighteenth-century ideal city at 215 meters in the Tenna valley, rebuilt by papal commission on a 137-by-144-meter quadrangle after the old hill village collapsed.
Labro
Province: Rieti
A 355-person stone borgo at 628 meters, restored since the 1960s by a Belgian architect and his descendants.
San Nicola Arcella
Province: Cosenza
A cliff village above the Tyrrhenian Riviera dei Cedri, where a sea arch fronts a cove only reachable on foot or by boat.