Designation
Parco Nazionale
154 towns across 19 regions
Browse by region
Abruzzo34
Alfedena
Province: L'Aquila · 914 m
At 914 meters at the head of the upper Sangro valley, the Samnite Aufidena, with a 15,000-tomb necropolis and a Roman conquest in 298 BC.
Barrea
Province: L'Aquila · 1,066 m
A 1,066-meter spur above an artificial lake at the heart of the Abruzzo National Park, with a Samnite necropolis and an 11th-century di Sangro castle.
Calascio
Province: L'Aquila · 1,200 m
A village of 125 people under the highest castle in the Apennines, cast as the monk's refuge in Ladyhawke.
Campli
Province: Teramo · 393 m
A 393-meter town under the Monti della Laga, held by the Farnese for two centuries, with a Scala Santa carrying papal indulgence.
Campo di Giove
Province: L'Aquila · 1,064 m
At 1,064 meters under the southwestern Maiella, the highest village in the park, named for a Roman temple to Jupiter.
Capestrano
Province: L'Aquila · 465 m
A hilltop village at 465 meters above the Tirino valley, where in 1934 a farmer turned up the 6th-century BC limestone Warrior of Capestrano.
Caramanico Terme
Province: Pescara · 650 m
A 650-meter Majella spa village at the confluence of the Orfento and Orta rivers.
Castel del Monte
Province: L'Aquila · 1,346 m
At 1,346 meters under Monte Bolza facing Rocca Calascio, the capital of shepherds, whose wool reached the Medici and whose witches return each August.
Castelvecchio Calvisio
Province: L'Aquila · 1,067 m
118 people at 1,067 meters on a ridge above the Tirino, inside a fortified ellipse of stone walls with alleys orthogonal to its perimeter.
Civitella Alfedena
Province: L'Aquila · 1,123 m
At 1,123 meters above Lake Barrea, 285 residents, the trailhead for the Camosciara reserve and home of the Apennine Wolf Museum.
Civitella del Tronto
Province: Teramo · 589 m
A rocky crest at 589 meters above the Tronto valley, crowned by the last Bourbon fortress to surrender to united Italy in March 1861.
Corfinio
Province: L'Aquila · 346 m
A village of under a thousand on the Peligna valley floor at 346 meters, sitting on the Italic League's would-be capital Italia.
Fara San Martino
Province: Chieti · 440 m
A pasta-making town at 440 meters, where the Verde river runs out of a two-meter slot in the Majella wall.
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.
Isola del Gran Sasso d'Italia
Province: Teramo · 415 m
At 415 meters at the foot of a massif holding the Apennines' highest peak outside Sicily, the commune's sanctuary ranks among the world's fifteen most-visited Catholic shrines.
L'Aquila
Province: L'Aquila · 721 m
The regional capital at 721 meters, founded by Frederick II around 1240 and still reconstructing after the 2009 earthquake.
Lama dei Peligni
Province: Chieti · 669 m
A 669-meter Majella village known for chamois, the Cavallone cave, and a prehistoric burial dug from Fonterossi dated 7000 to 5000 BC.
Manoppello
Province: Pescara · 257 m
A hill town above the Pescara river, custodian since 1620 of the byssus veil known as the Volto Santo.
Ofena
Province: L'Aquila · 531 m
A 531-meter Vestian basin called the Forno d'Abruzzo, where Montepulciano ripens on what may be the oldest of its slopes.
Pacentro
Province: L'Aquila · 650 m
A medieval village at 650 meters under the Caldora castle towers, where every September a barefoot race honors a Madonna and a pop singer's grandparents.
Pescasseroli
Province: L'Aquila · 1,167 m
At 1,167 meters at the head of the Sangro valley, capital of Italy's oldest national park and birthplace of Benedetto Croce.
Pescocostanzo
Province: L'Aquila · 1,395 m
A planned Renaissance town at 1,395 meters on the Quarto Grande plateau, with bobbin lace, wrought iron, and the wood ceilings of a five-nave church.
Pettorano sul Gizio
Province: L'Aquila · 656 m
At 656 meters above the Gizio river, a Cantelmo fortress town that guarded the gateway to the Peligna valley for four hundred years.
Pietracamela
Province: Teramo · 1,005 m
A village of 218 people clinging at 1,005 meters under the north wall of Corno Piccolo, birthplace of Italian Apennine climbing in 1925.
Pretoro
Province: Chieti · 530 m
A village of 856 stacked at 530 meters on the eastern Maiella, where wolves live behind fencing and woodturners still work on Via Roma.
Rivisondoli
Province: L'Aquila · 1,320 m
At 1,320 meters on the Cinque Miglia plateau, a village known for its Epiphany living nativity.
Roccacasale
Province: L'Aquila · 450 m
A village of 597 under the ruins of a castle blown up by Napoleon's army in 1803.
Roccamorice
Province: Pescara · 520 m
A village at 520 meters in the Majella foothills, gateway to the rock-cut hermitages carved into the surrounding limestone.
Roccaraso
Province: L'Aquila · 1,236 m
At 1,236 meters, the south of Italy's largest ski resort, leveled in 1943 and rebuilt from rubble.
Santo Stefano di Sessanio
Province: L'Aquila · 1,250 m
A Medici outpost at 1,250 meters, restored building by building since 1999 into Italy's first scattered hotel.
Scanno
Province: L'Aquila · 1,057 m
A 1,057-meter Sagittario valley village where women in black still walk the alleys photographed by Cartier-Bresson and Giacomelli.
Sulmona
Province: L'Aquila · 405 m
At 405 meters in the Valle Peligna, birthplace of Ovid in 43 BC and home of the sugared-almond confetti industry since the 14th century.
Tocco da Casauria
Province: Pescara · 356 m
A 356-meter hill town between the Pescara river and the Maiella, built around a Carolingian abbey and an herb liqueur called Centerba.
Villetta Barrea
Province: L'Aquila · 975 m
At 975 meters on the shore of Lake Barrea, a village inside the Abruzzo National Park where red deer walk the streets alongside residents.
Aosta Valley2
Aymavilles
Province: Aosta Valley · 646 m
A village at 646 metres above a river gorge, where the road up the valley begins and a Roman aqueduct still crosses the Grand'Eyvia on a single arch.
Cogne
Province: Aosta Valley · 1,534 m
The mining town turned capital of the Gran Paradiso, the Aosta Valley's largest commune with 95 percent of its land inside Italy's oldest park.
Apulia13
Andria
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 151 m
Frederick II's favourite Apulian city, the birthplace of burrata, ruling the Murge plateau eighteen kilometers north of its most famous castle.
Cassano delle Murge
Province: Bari · 341 m
A Murge foothills town at 341 meters at the gate of the Alta Murgia park, with the 1,300-hectare Foresta Mercadante mostly inside its territory.
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.
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.
Mattinata
Province: Foggia · 75 m
The only Apulian town that faces south on the Adriatic, the white amphitheater of the eastern Gargano beneath Monte Sacro.
Minervino Murge
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 445 m
A ridge town at 445 meters where the Murgia plateau breaks off into open view, inside the national park that carries its name.
Monte Sant'Angelo
Province: Foggia · 843 m
The Gargano peak at 843 meters, the oldest western shrine to an archangel, UNESCO since 2011.
Peschici
Province: Foggia · 91 m
A Gargano cliff-top village above the Adriatic, white houses spilling toward the sea and trabucchi on the headlands.
Poggiorsini
Province: Bari · 461 m
The smallest commune in metropolitan Bari, an Orsini estate of 1609 that became an independent town only in 1957.
Rodi Garganico
Province: Foggia · 42 m
A Gargano promontory town above the Adriatic, citrus capital of the peninsula, with DOP oranges and lemons grown on the terraces below it.
San Giovanni Rotondo
Province: Foggia · 565 m
The Gargano town that became Italy's second pilgrimage site after Assisi, its skyline defined by a stone sanctuary large enough to seat 6,500.
Vico del Gargano
Province: Foggia · 445 m
A Gargano hill town at 445 meters where a Norman castle, a kiss alley, and DOP citrus terraces step down toward the Adriatic.
Vieste
Province: Foggia · 43 m
The Gargano headland of whitewashed alleys on a white limestone cliff, with the Pizzomunno sea stack standing 26 meters offshore.
Basilicata9
Calvello
Province: Potenza · 730 m
A 730-meter ceramic town working clay since 1200, when Benedictines from Faenza brought the wheel south.
Lagonegro
Province: Potenza · 666 m
A 666-meter town founded by Byzantine monks on a defensive promontory, split between a medieval castle village and a modern square below.
Latronico
Province: Potenza · 888 m
A mountain town at 888 meters on the northern edge of the Pollino, with two prehistoric thermal springs at the Calda hamlet below.
Rivello
Province: Potenza · 479 m
A 479-meter ridge above the Noce valley where Lombards and Byzantines lived side by side, holding Latin and Greek rites until the seventeenth century.
Rotonda
Province: Potenza · 626 m
The Pollino park's Lucanian gateway: a 3,171-resident borgo at 626m on the Basilicata/Calabria border, headquarters for the Parco Nazionale del Pollino, Italy's largest national park, with the Loricato pine forests immediately above town.
Sasso di Castalda
Province: Potenza · 949 m
A 949-meter village in the Lucanian Apennines whose emigrants produced the engineer who launched Apollo 11, now crossed by a 300-meter Tibetan footbridge.
Terranova di Pollino
Province: Potenza · 926 m
At 926 meters on the Lucanian side of the Pollino, the gateway into Italy's largest national park, home of the Sarmento red potato.
Valsinni
Province: Matera · 250 m
A 1,344-resident Lucanian borgo on a hilltop above the Sinni river, where a 16th-century Renaissance poet was murdered by her brothers in 1545, marked today by a Touring Club Bandiera Arancione and a place inside the Pollino park.
Viggiano
Province: Potenza · 975 m
A 975-meter Val d'Agri ridge town, home of the Black Madonna of Lucania and the Italian folk harp, on Europe's largest onshore oil field.
Calabria16
Aieta
Province: Cosenza · 524 m
An eagle's-nest village in the western Pollino, with one of the few sixteenth-century Renaissance palazzi standing in Calabria.
Alessandria del Carretto
Province: Cosenza · 1,043 m
The highest village in the Pollino at 1,043 meters, the only Italian commune carrying its founder's full name, with a fir-tree ritual every 3 May.
Belvedere Marittimo
Province: Cosenza · 150 m
A Riviera dei Cedri town on the Tyrrhenian, its castle set on the highest coastal hill above a convent that has kept a saint's relics for three centuries.
Bova
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 820 m
The capital of the Bovesìa, a 416-resident Aspromonte hilltop borgo at 820m and the cultural centre of the Grecanic minority, where the Calabrian-Greek dialect descended from Byzantine-era Greek is still spoken by elders.
Cerchiara di Calabria
Province: Cosenza · 650 m
A village at 650 meters below a mountain rock sanctuary, with a sulphurous cave feeding the thermal springs beneath it.
Corigliano-Rossano
Province: Cosenza · 219 m
The Sibari plain city merged in 2018 from two older towns, one built around a Norman castle and the other around a Byzantine manuscript tradition.
Gerace
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 470 m
A 470-meter conglomerate rock above the Locride, holding Calabria's largest cathedral.
Laino Borgo
Province: Cosenza · 582 m
A village on the Lao river canyon, at the western entrance to Pollino National Park, known as Calabria's rafting capital.
Morano Calabro
Province: Cosenza · 694 m
A conical hill of stone houses stacked under a Norman-Swabian castle at the southern gate of the Pollino, called Italy's nativity village.
Mormanno
Province: Cosenza · 840 m
A Pollino mountain borgo at 840 meters between the Costa and Vernita ridges, known for lentils, white poverelli beans and the bocconotto pastry.
Praia a Mare
Province: Cosenza · 10 m
A Tyrrhenian beach town in the Gulf of Policastro, backed by mountains and facing an offshore island.
San Giovanni in Fiore
Province: Cosenza · 1,049 m
The capital of the Sila Grande at 1,049 meters, Italy's most populated commune above a thousand.
Saracena
Province: Cosenza · 606 m
A 606-meter Pollino borgo named for its Saracen souk and protected by Slow Food for a passito Moscato traced to the sixteenth century.
Scilla
Province: Reggio di Calabria · 91 m
Homer's sea-monster headland on the Costa Viola, the Castello Ruffo on the cliff above Chianalea and the swordfish boats working the Strait below.
Spezzano della Sila
Province: Cosenza · 800 m
A Sila plateau borgo at 800 meters, the gateway to the national park and its high forests.
Taverna
Province: Catanzaro · 530 m
A hilltown at the foot of a mountain plateau, its stone core arranged around a fifteenth-century Dominican church.
Campania23
Agropoli
Province: Salerno · 24 m
The gateway commune of the Cilento, a Byzantine acropolis on a promontory taken by the Saracens in 882 as a base for raids on Salerno.
Alife
Province: Caserta · 110 m
A Roman walled town at the foot of the Matese, founded as a 326 BC oppidum, with Italy's fourth-largest amphitheatre still half-buried.
Ascea
Province: Salerno · 230 m
Two villages, a hilltown at 230 meters and a Cilento marina, with Parmenides and Zeno's Eleatic school in the ruins of Greek Velia below.
Auletta
Province: Salerno · 280 m
A Tanagro hill town above the Cilento-Vallo di Diano park, fortified by 1000 AD, scene of an 1861 anti-Piedmont massacre and an 1857 earthquake.
Camerota
Province: Salerno · 422 m
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.
Capaccio Paestum
Province: Salerno · 419 m
Three Doric temples of 550 to 450 BC on the Sele plain, with mozzarella di bufala DOP on the buffalo flats below.
Castelcivita
Province: Salerno · 526 m
A small Alburni hill town at 526 meters in the Cilento national park, the surface entrance to a 4,800-meter karst cave inhabited 40,000 years ago.
Castellabate
Province: Salerno · 280 m
A hilltown on a 280-meter Cilento ridge, with a Bandiera Blu beach below and the Benvenuti al Sud film.
Centola
Province: Salerno · 336 m
A Cilento hill village at 336 meters whose seaside frazione carries the name of Aeneas' helmsman.
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.
Cusano Mutri
Province: Benevento · 475 m
A Sannio hill borgo at 475 meters on the south face of the Matese, the only town in the area spared by the 1688 earthquake.
Ercolano
Province: Napoli · 44 m
Ercolano is the modern town built directly over Herculaneum, the Roman seaside resort buried under 25m of pyroclastic mud in AD 79 rather than the ash that fell on Pompeii, which is why its wood, papyrus, and upper floors survive when no other Roman site's do.
Letino
Province: Caserta · 961 m
At 961 meters the highest commune in the province of Caserta, where in April 1877 anarchists declared a Republic of Letino in the village hall.
Morcone
Province: Benevento · 600 m
A Sannite hill town at 600 meters above the Tammaro valley, with 5th-century BC walls and the convent where a future saint took his vows.
Morigerati
Province: Salerno · 340 m
A 608-person Cilento village above the Bussento gorge, the river surfacing from underground caves directly beneath the cliffs.
Padula
Province: Salerno · 699 m
A hill town at 699 meters, holding the Certosa di San Lorenzo and the world's largest cloister.
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.
Pisciotta
Province: Salerno · 171 m
A Cilento hilltop town of olive terraces above the Tyrrhenian, where fishermen still pull anchovies with a medieval net.
Pompei
Province: Napoli · 30 m
The Roman city buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD, dug back up since 1748, and a modern town around Bartolo Longo's 1876 sanctuary.
Roscigno
Province: Salerno · 570 m
A Cilento ghost town at 570 meters, emptied by a 1902 landslide and known as the Pompeii of the twentieth century.
Teggiano
Province: Salerno · 635 m
A ridge town at 635 meters above the valley it once named, held by the Sanseverino for three centuries.
Torre Annunziata
Province: Napoli · 15 m
Capital of Italian pasta in the interwar period and home of the Roman Villa di Poppea, on the bay at the foot of Vesuvius.
Trentinara
Province: Salerno · 606 m
A Cilento balcony at 606 meters on the Cantenna cliff, called the Terrazza del Cilento, with a 1,500-meter zipline that drops 170 meters toward Paestum.
Emilia-Romagna4
Bagno di Romagna
Province: Forlì-Cesena · 491 m
A 491-meter thermal town at the head of the Savio valley, drawing on springs that have run at 47 degrees since Roman times.
Corniglio
Province: Parma · 690 m
A 690-meter Parma-Apennine commune inside the Tosco-Emiliano park, with a thirteenth-century Rossi castle and the Lagdei plateau above.
Portico e San Benedetto
Province: Forlì-Cesena · 309 m
A three-tier medieval borgo at 309 meters on the Montone river, capital of Florence's Romagna territories from 1386.
Premilcuore
Province: Forlì-Cesena · 459 m
A 459-meter walled borgo on the Rabbi river, an entry point to the Foreste Casentinesi from the Romagna side.
Lazio6
Amatrice
Province: Rieti · 955 m
A 955-meter Apennine town leveled by the 24 August 2016 earthquake, slowly rebuilding the streets that gave amatriciana its name.
Picinisco
Province: Frosinone · 725 m
A medieval village at 725 meters on the eastern edge of Lazio, the source of much of Italo-Scottish emigration.
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 harbour painted in 18th-century Bourbon-pastel.
Sabaudia
Province: Latina · 17 m
A rationalist city built in 253 days on drained Pontine marshland, founded 15 April 1934 between Lago di Paola and the Tyrrhenian dunes.
San Donato Val di Comino
Province: Frosinone · 728 m
A medieval village at 728 meters at the gateway to Forca d'Acero, the pass into the Abruzzo National Park.
San Felice Circeo
Province: Latina · 100 m
A medieval borgo on the flank of a promontory that Homer made the home of Circe in the Odyssey.
Liguria4
Levanto
Province: La Spezia · 5 m
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.
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Monterosso al Mare
Province: La Spezia · 12 m
The westernmost and largest of the five villages, where Eugenio Montale spent the childhood summers that became Ossi di seppia in 1925.
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Riomaggiore
Province: La Spezia · 35 m
The easternmost of the five villages, 1,326 people stacked above a fishing inlet, terraced vineyards climbing 250 meters straight off the sea.
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Vernazza
Province: La Spezia · 3 m
The middle village of the coast, the only one with a natural harbor, buried under four meters of mud in October 2011.
Lombardy3
Bormio
Province: Sondrio · 1,225 m
An Alpine spa town at 1,225 meters where three high passes meet and Roman thermal water has fed the baths for two thousand years.
Livigno
Province: Sondrio · 1,816 m
At 1,816 meters in the Italian Alps near the Swiss border, a duty-free ski valley that drains north into the Black Sea, not the Mediterranean.
Ponte di Legno
Province: Brescia · 1,257 m
The uppermost commune in the province, 1,257 meters up, where two streams meet under the Adamello range to form a river.
Marche6
Acquasanta Terme
Province: Ascoli Piceno · 392 m
A sulphur-spring spa at 392 meters in the upper Tronto valley, where the water still surfaces at 30 degrees.
Amandola
Province: Fermo · 550 m
A Sibillini gateway at 550 meters on three hills above the Tenna valley, founded 1248 and damaged but not levelled in 2016.
Arquata del Tronto
Province: Ascoli Piceno · 777 m
At 777 meters between two national parks, the Marche commune levelled by the 2016 earthquakes and still rebuilding nine years on.
San Ginesio
Province: Macerata · 680 m
The Balcony of the Sibillini at 680 meters, where a 1295 pilgrim hospital and the only flowery gothic collegiate church in the Marche stand within the same walls.
Valfornace
Province: Macerata · 441 m
A 909-resident Sibillini commune at 441 meters in the upper Chienti valley, born in 2017 from the merger of Pievebovigliana and Fiordimonte.
Visso
Province: Macerata · 607 m
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Molise8
Castel San Vincenzo
Province: Isernia · 749 m
A 749-meter village near the Volturno source, sharing ground with one of medieval Europe's most powerful abbeys and a ninth-century frescoed crypt.
Fornelli
Province: Isernia · 530 m
A walled medieval borgo at 530 meters with seven towers and the birthplace of Nancy Pelosi's mother, eight kilometers west of Isernia.
Isernia
Province: Isernia · 423 m
A provincial capital on a 423-meter rock spine, with a Paleolithic site dated 700,000 years and a thirteenth-century public fountain.
Pizzone
Province: Isernia · 724 m
A 313-person Mainarde village at 724 meters, above the Volturno springs.
Roccamandolfi
Province: Isernia · 850 m
At 850 meters at the foot of Monte Miletto, a Matese village of brigand legends, Lombard ruins, and a Tibetan bridge over the Callora canyon.
Scapoli
Province: Isernia · 668 m
Italy's zampogna bagpipe capital: a 586-resident borgo in the Mainarde at 668m, with a centuries-old tradition of hand-building the zampogna and the Bandiera Arancione plus national park signals.
Sepino
Province: Campobasso · 698 m
A hilltop borgo at 698 meters at the foot of the Matese, two kilometers above the Roman Saepinum, the open-air city the sheep tracks built.
Venafro
Province: Isernia · 222 m
A 222-meter town near the Lazio border where an emperor founded a colony and Pliny called the local oil the best in the Empire.
Piedmont4
Mergozzo
Province: Verbano-Cusio-Ossola · 204 m
A village on the western shore of a small lake cut off from its larger neighbor by river sediment, with a centuries-old elm on its lakefront piazza.
Ornavasso
Province: Verbano-Cusio-Ossola · 215 m
A Toce-valley town at 215 meters, marble quarry for a famous Milan cathedral and the southernmost Walser colony in the Ossola.
Ronco Canavese
Province: Torino · 956 m
A 271-inhabitant Francoprovenzale village at 956 meters on the Piemonte side of the Gran Paradiso National Park.
Vogogna
Province: Verbano-Cusio-Ossola · 226 m
An Ossola medieval capital at 226 meters on the Toce, with a castle of 1348 and five centuries as seat of the lower valley's jurisdiction.
Sardinia9
Aritzo
Province: Nuoro · 800 m
A Mandrolisai mountain village at 800 meters in chestnut and hazelnut forest, where snow once travelled out in straw and came back as lemon sorbet.
Atzara
Province: Nuoro · 553 m
A Mandrolisai wine village on the western Gennargentu, painted in the early twentieth century by Spanish costumbristas and the Sardinian Scuola di Atzara.
Baunei
Province: Nuoro · 480 m
A village at 480 meters on the Monte Santo limestone ridge, its territory holding a national-monument beach and a trek regularly called Italy's hardest.
Dorgali
Province: Nuoro · 387 m
A Supramonte town at 387 meters, with a coastal frazione, a Nuragic village hidden in a sinkhole, and a limestone gorge cut through the massif to the south.
Fonni
Province: Nuoro · 1,000 m
The highest village in Sardinia at 1,000 meters on the Gennargentu, with ski lifts climbing above the town and the Madonna dei Martiri sanctuary at its edge.
Gavoi
Province: Nuoro · 777 m
A 777-meter Barbagia hilltop village above Lake Gusana with a Bandiera Arancione of the Touring Club, the country's most-attended summer literary festival (L'Isola delle Storie), and the PDO Fiore Sardo pecorino made here for at least three centuries.
La Maddalena
Province: Sassari · 19 m
The only inhabited town of a sixty-island granite archipelago between Sardinia and Corsica, and the place Giuseppe Garibaldi chose to die.
Oliena
Province: Nuoro · 380 m
A Supramonte village at the foot of the massif's highest peak, source of Cannonau Nepente, base camp for Tiscali and the Lanaitto valley.
Orgosolo
Province: Nuoro · 620 m
A Barbagia village at 620 meters with over 150 political murals painted on its walls since the 1969 Pratobello revolt.
Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol1
Tuscany8
Capoliveri
Province: Livorno · 167 m
A medieval hill town at 167 meters on the eastern lobe of Elba, with 35 kilometers of coast below.
Capraia Isola
Province: Livorno · 19 m
A volcanic island of 370 residents and one village, a penal colony from 1873 to 1986 and a national park since.
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Fivizzano
Province: Massa-Carrara · 373 m
The draw here is not the capoluogo but its 92 mountain frazioni, scattered across a Lunigiana commune where a thermal gorge, an intact fortress and a ridge-top hamlet each stand as their own destination.
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Grosseto
Province: Grosseto · 10 m
The Maremma capital on the Ombrone river, ringed by hexagonal Medici walls of 1564 that now serve as the city's public park.
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.
Licciana Nardi
Province: Massa-Carrara · 215 m
A Lunigiana Malaspina village at 215 meters in the Apennine Tosco-Emiliano park, named in 1933 for the Risorgimento patriot Anacarsi Nardi.
Livorno
Province: Livorno · 3 m
Tuscany's working port and Medici-planned 'New City' — a 16th-century planned town built on reclaimed coast, with a Venice-like canal quarter, the Quattro Mori monument, and a 1.5-km seafront promenade that locals call the world's most beautiful balcony.
Poppi
Province: Arezzo · 437 m
The Casentino borgo at 437 meters above the field where Dante fought at Campaldino in June 1289.
Umbria2
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.
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.
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.