A country · 1,491 places · 20 regions
Italy, all of it.
1,491 curated places across 20 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Lazio, Tuscany, Veneto and Lombardy — read below as chapters, with 16 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Lazio · 200 places
Lazio
The hilltop town of Tivoli, 30 kilometers east of Rome in the Tiburtine Hills, contains two UNESCO World Heritage Sites within walking distance of each other: Hadrian's vast 2nd-century imperial retreat Villa Adriana on the plain below, and the 16th-century Villa d'Este with its elaborate terraced fountain garden. The Villa d'Este's water engineering, driven entirely by gravity from a diverted river, produces hundreds of fountains and water features cascading down the hillside through formal Renaissance gardens.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Tuscany · 154 places
Tuscany
Montepulciano runs along a narrow limestone ridge at just over 600 metres between the Val di Chiana to the east and the Val d'Orcia to the west, in the far southeast of the province of Siena. The plan is dictated by the ridge: a single spine, the Corso, climbs from Porta al Prato at the low northern end to Piazza Grande at the summit, with side lanes dropping steeply off both flanks. It is a demanding town to walk — the ascent is continuous for roughly a kilometre and a half — and the reward at the top is a square that opens abruptly onto views reaching to Monte Amiata in one direction and Lake Trasimeno in the other. The story behind it. Founded in the early Middle Ages on an older Etruscan settlement, Montepulciano spent centuries as a contested frontier town between Siena and Florence and finally attached itself firmly to Florence in the fifteenth century. That allegiance is written across the architecture. Florentine architects arrived with Florentine ideas: Michelozzo rebuilt the Palazzo Comunale with a rusticated travertine front and a battlemented tower that consciously imitates the Palazzo Vecchio, and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder and Vignola gave the Corso a series of classical palace façades. The result is a town whose skyline is medieval and whose street elevations are Renaissance. What you actually see today. Piazza Grande holds four different faces of civic power: the Palazzo Comunale with its climbable tower, the unfinished raw-brick front of the cathedral, the Palazzo Nobili-Tarugi and the Palazzo Contucci with a working wine cellar beneath it. In the corner stands the Pozzo dei Grifi e dei Leoni of 1520, a well framed by two columns and an architrave carrying the Medici arms between griffins and lions. Inside the Duomo, built between 1594 and 1680 to a design by Ippolito Scalza, hangs Taddeo di Bartolo's great Assumption triptych of 1401 above the high altar, alongside dispersed fragments of Michelozzo's tomb for the humanist Bartolomeo Aragazzi. Below the walls to the southwest, reached by a cypress avenue, stands the church of San Biagio, begun in 1518 by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder: a Greek-cross temple in honey-coloured travertine with one completed bell tower and one left as a stump, and one of the purest High Renaissance interiors in Tuscany. On screen. Montepulciano is the place where the Twilight films put Volterra. The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) needed an Italian city for the Volturi, and although Stephenie Meyer's novel names Volterra, the location team scouted more than a dozen towns and settled on Montepulciano as the closest match to the book. Principal photography, which had begun in Vancouver in March 2009, ended here on 29 May, with hundreds of local extras in red cloaks staging the invented festival of Saint Marcus. Piazza Grande plays Volterra's main square, and the tower of the Palazzo Comunale is the clock tower beneath which Edward prepares to step into the sunlight. Two things are worth knowing before making the trip: Volterra, the town in the book, is roughly 100 kilometres northwest and appears nowhere in the film The fountain Bella runs through has no permanent counterpart in Piazza Grande, which contains a stone well and no fountain at all — the square was dressed for a week, not preserved Montepulciano also appears in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), one of several towns in that film standing in for a single fictionalised Tuscany. Wine. Vino Nobile di Montepulciano was the first Italian wine granted DOCG status, in 1980. It is made mainly from Prugnolo Gentile, the local clone of Sangiovese, which must form at least seventy per cent of the blend, and it is aged for a minimum of two years, three for a Riserva. It has nothing to do with the Montepulciano grape of Abruzzo, a completely separate variety that produces a completely different wine — a confusion that catches out visitors constantly. Several historic producers keep cellars carved into the soft sandstone directly under the Corso, including Contucci beneath its palace on Piazza Grande and De' Ricci with a spectacular vaulted descent, and most offer tastings without appointment. Getting there and timing. The town lies about seventy kilometres southeast of Siena and ninety minutes from Florence by car; the nearest useful station is Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, twenty minutes away by bus or taxi, on the main Florence–Rome line. Cars must be left in the lots below the walls, and a shuttle runs to the top for those unwilling to climb. The Bravìo delle Botti on the last Sunday of August sends teams from the town's eight contrade pushing eighty-kilogram barrels up the same slope, preceded by a week of costumed dinners. April to June and September to October give the best combination of weather and space; harvest activity peaks in late September.
✦ April to October · $$
Chapter III · Veneto · 126 places
Veneto
The Tre Cime di Lavaredo, called the Drei Zinnen on the German-speaking side, stand on the watershed ridge between the Sexten valley in South Tyrol and Auronzo di Cadore in the province of Belluno. That line was the Austro-Italian border until 1918 and remains a provincial and linguistic boundary today. Three towers of Dolomia Principale rise from a shared plinth of scree: Cima Grande in the centre at 2,999 metres, Cima Ovest to the west at 2,973 metres, and the slimmer Cima Piccola to the east at 2,857 metres. Seen from the north the three north faces line up as flat, near-vertical plates six hundred metres high; seen from the south, from the road head, they look squat and disappointing. Almost everyone who photographs them does so from the north, which is why the walk around the group runs anticlockwise. Reef, border, battlefield. The rock is a Triassic carbonate platform, built by algae and sponges in a shallow tropical sea roughly 230 million years ago and lifted more or less intact during the Alpine orogeny, which is why the strata in the faces are horizontal rather than folded. Paul Grohmann made the first ascent of Cima Grande on 21 August 1869 with the Sexten guides Franz Innerkofler and Peter Salcher; the Innerkofler family went on to climb most of the surrounding summits. From 1915 to 1917 the front line ran straight through here. Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops tunnelled into Monte Paterno and the Toblinger Knoten, fought at close range in positions above 2,500 metres, and left the galleries, ladders and gun emplacements that today form the region's via ferrata network. Sepp Innerkofler, the most famous guide of his generation, was killed on Monte Paterno in July 1915 while leading an assault on a position he had climbed for pleasure many times before. The wall that changed climbing. In August 1933 Emilio Comici, with the Cortina brothers Angelo and Giuseppe Dimai, forced a direct line up the overhanging north face of Cima Grande over three days, using pegs and stirrups on ground that could not be free-climbed. Comici argued that the ideal route was the line a drop of water would take falling from the summit, and the direttissima idea he introduced there governed European big-wall climbing for the next forty years. Riccardo Cassin and Vittorio Ratti answered in 1935 on the still more overhanging north face of Cima Ovest. Both faces remain serious undertakings, and on a summer afternoon you can pick out parties on them from the trail with the naked eye. On screen and in the record books. The three peaks are more often an establishing aerial than a set. Their profile is the visual shorthand for the Dolomites in Italian television drama, most persistently in RAI's long-running series Un passo dal cielo, which is set in the Alta Pusteria immediately north of here and uses the Sexten Dolomites as its permanent backdrop. The more consistently filmed event is athletic rather than dramatic: the toll road up from Misurina has been a summit finish of the Giro d'Italia since 1967, and the stages won here by Eddy Merckx in a 1968 snowstorm and by Vincenzo Nibali in an equally miserable 2013 are among the race's most replayed footage. What you actually see today. A private toll road climbs seven kilometres from Lake Misurina to Rifugio Auronzo at 2,320 metres, built in 1954 and now the busiest trailhead in the eastern Alps; the toll has climbed past thirty euros a car in high season and the barrier closes when the car park fills, often before nine in the morning. From there the circuit is roughly ten kilometres with about 350 metres of ascent, taking three to four hours at a walking pace. It passes Rifugio Lavaredo, crosses the Forcella Lavaredo, and reaches Rifugio Locatelli, the Dreizinnenhütte, opened in 1883 and positioned squarely in front of the north faces. The return leg traverses beneath the west face and the Forcella Col di Mezzo. Nothing on the loop requires scrambling, but the ground is stony throughout and exposed to weather with no shelter between huts. Getting there and timing. The road opens when the snow clears, usually in late May or June, and closes again by early November; outside those months the approach is a long ski tour or snowshoe from Misurina. Buses run in July and August from Cortina and Dobbiaco to Rifugio Auronzo, and using them avoids the parking lottery entirely. The north faces are lit in the first hour of daylight and again at sunset; between eleven and four in high summer the light is flat and the loop is crowded end to end.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Lombardy · 117 places
Lombardy
Lake Como lies about 50 kilometres north of Milan, in the Lombard pre-Alps, and it is shaped like an inverted Y. The southern legs run to the cities of Como and Lecco; the single northern arm reaches Colico and the mouth of the Adda, which both feeds and drains the lake. At the fork stands Bellagio, on a promontory that is the most photographed point on the lake. The water covers roughly 146 square kilometres, which makes it the third-largest Italian lake, but its defining statistic is depth: over 400 metres at its deepest, one of the deepest lakes in Europe, its bed sunk well below sea level. That trench was gouged by a glacier and the sides were never widened, so mountains rise almost vertically from the shoreline, several above 2,000 metres, and the villages cling to whatever narrow shelf they can find. The story behind it. Como was Roman Comum, refounded by Julius Caesar; both Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger came from here, and the younger Pliny described his lakeside villas in letters that read like the first property brochure in European literature. The taste for villa life never went away. From the seventeenth century onward Milanese and Lombard aristocrats built along the shore, and by the nineteenth century the lake was a fixed stop on the Romantic tour, drawing Shelley, Byron, Liszt and Verdi. Villa Carlotta at Tremezzo dates from the end of the seventeenth century and holds Canova sculpture and terraced azalea gardens; Villa Melzi at Bellagio is neoclassical, from 1808; Villa Serbelloni crowns the Bellagio headland; Villa d'Este at Cernobbio, built in 1568 for a cardinal, has been a hotel since 1873. The city of Como itself built its wealth on silk, and still supplies a large share of Europe's woven silk. On screen. Lake Como closes Casino Royale (2006), and it carries two distinct Bond locations. Bond recuperates from his torture at a private clinic filmed at Villa del Balbianello, on the wooded promontory at Lenno; the loggia scenes with Vesper Lynd, including the wheelchair and the terrace overlooking the water, were shot on its stone belvedere. The film's final scene, in which Bond shoots Mr White in the leg and delivers the line the whole picture has been withholding, was filmed at Villa Gaeta, a lavish 1920s house at San Siro on the western shore north of Menaggio. Both are on the same stretch of the Tremezzina and Centro Lago, a few kilometres apart by boat. The lake had already served Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002) for the Naboo lakeside retreat, again at Balbianello, and Ocean's Twelve (2004) used the shoreline villas as well. What you actually see today. The lake works best as a set of short water hops rather than a drive. Navigazione Lago di Como runs slow boats, fast hydrofoils and car ferries; the car ferry triangle links Varenna, Bellagio and Cadenabbia, and it is the only way to cross the middle of the lake without a long detour. Varenna is the tightest and prettiest of the eastern villages, with the lakeside Passeggiata degli Innamorati and the ruined Castello di Vezio above it. Bellagio's stepped lanes climb between the two harbours. Menaggio is the practical base on the west side, with the Sanagra valley and the Val Menaggio route towards Lake Lugano behind it. Above Como, the Brunate funicular has run since 1894 and lifts you 500 metres in seven minutes to a ridge with the whole southern basin below. Como city rewards a slow morning on foot: the Duomo took from 1396 to 1770 to finish and mixes Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque in one facade, and a few streets away sits the Casa del Fascio of 1932 to 1936, Giuseppe Terragni's rationalist office block and one of the most studied modernist buildings in Italy. North of the city the Greenway del Lago di Como links Colonno to Griante over about ten kilometres of old mule tracks, lakeside lanes and villa gates, which is the simplest way to see this shore without a car. Getting there and timing. Trains from Milano Centrale reach Varenna-Esino in about an hour, and Milano Cadorna reaches Como Nord Lago in a similar time, arriving a hundred metres from the boat pier. Malpensa and Bergamo airports are both within roughly ninety minutes. Late April to June is the best combination of gardens in flower and moderate crowds; September brings warm water and thinner traffic. July and August fill the ferries and the single lakeside roads, which are narrow, walled and slow. Many villa gardens, including Balbianello and Carlotta, shut from November to March, and the lake weather turns grey and drizzly through the winter. Two local winds set the rhythm: the Breva blows up-lake in the afternoon, the Tivano down-lake in the early morning.
✦ April to June, September to October · $$$
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