Silence
10 towns quieter than the countryside around them
The silence index scores every catalogued comune from the numbers alone: residents, people per square kilometre, drive time to the nearest airport hub, distance from the nearest big town, and whether a train reaches it. Higher means more silent. Every region has a baseline of quiet; these 10 sit at least 25 points above their own region's median score, ranked by that gap. The countryside around them is ordinary Italy. They are not.
Some towns are quiet because their region is quiet, which is no achievement. These ten are outliers at home: each scores at least 25 points above its own region's median on our silence index, ranked by that gap.
The countryside around them is ordinary, working Italy. The town itself is something else. That gap between a place and its surroundings is the closest thing to solitude a map can promise.
- 1.Madesimo+46 vs region medianSondrio · LombardyA ski village at 1,550 meters at the head of Valle Spluga, with lifts to 2,880 meters and the Canalone off-piste descent.
- 2.Monteviasco+45 vs region medianVarese · LombardyA near-abandoned mountain frazione of Curiglia con Monteviasco at 928 metres above the Veddasca valley — historically reached only by an aerial cable-car since 1989 (since suspended) or a 1,400-step stone staircase, with permanent population in the single digits.
- 3.Triora+45 vs region medianImperia · LiguriaThe witches' village at 776 meters in the upper Valle Argentina, where the Inquisition put around 200 women on trial between 1587 and 1589.
- 4.Rocca Pietore+44 vs region medianBelluno · VenetoAn Agordino borgo at 1,143 meters under the Marmolada, where the Pettorina cuts a two-kilometer gorge through 100-meter rock walls.
- 5.Auronzo di Cadore+44 vs region medianBelluno · VenetoA five-kilometer ribbon town along an artificial lake at 864 meters, the gateway to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and Lake Misurina.
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- 6.Morigerati+44 vs region medianSalerno · CampaniaA 608-person Cilento village above the Bussento gorge, the river surfacing from underground caves directly beneath the cliffs.
- 7.Sauris+44 vs region medianUdine · Friuli-Venezia GiuliaA 1,212-meter German-speaking island in the Carnic Alps, second-highest commune in Friuli, where Tyrolean settlers founded the village around the thirteenth century.
- 8.San Vito di Cadore+43 vs region medianBelluno · VenetoA Cadore valley village at 1,011 meters between the Antelao and the Pelmo, ten kilometers south of Cortina and built around a fifteenth-century frescoed chapel.
- 9.Alleghe+42 vs region medianBelluno · VenetoA lakeside village at 979 meters under Monte Civetta, formed in 1771 when ten million cubic meters of rock crashed into the Cordevole.
- 10.Forni di Sotto+42 vs region medianUdine · Friuli-Venezia GiuliaCarnia's Dolomite gateway — a 548-resident alpine borgo at 791m at the head of the Val Tagliamento, gateway to the Parco Naturale delle Dolomiti Friulane (UNESCO Dolomites), with Borgo Autentico mark, a centro almost entirely rebuilt after the 1944 German wartime burning, and direct access to the Forni Avoltri-Sappada ski + hiking circuit.
We write about towns like these every Sunday, one town a week, with the photo, the food, the festa. Free, from Pietrasanta.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Putignano
Province: Bari
Europe's longest-running carnival — Putignano Carnevale has run continuously since 1394, with 631 years of cartapesta papier-mâché floats, a 26,000-resident Murgia town on the Bari–Lecce plateau, and the Grotta del Trullo karst cave inside the centro.
Pistoia
Province: Pistoia
Italy's nursery capital and the medieval Tuscan rival that gave its name to the pistol — a quietly extraordinary centro storico of zebra-striped Romanesque churches, Andrea della Robbia's polychrome frieze on the Ospedale del Ceppo, and Italy's Capital of Culture 2017, all 30 minutes from Florence by train.
Tropea
Province: Vibo Valentia
Cliff town on a tufa headland over the Tyrrhenian Coast of the Gods, with a Norman monastery on a sea rock.
Caldes
Province: Trento
A scattered Val di Sole commune on the Noce, six hamlets gathered around a thirteenth-century tower-house castle that once belonged to the Thun family.
Cantiano
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
A border borgo at 374 meters under Monte Catria on the old Via Flaminia, known for the Good Friday Turba and the sour-cherry visciola harvest.