By geography
What kind of place is it
Every town in the catalogue sits in one of these. The line between a hill town and a mountain town is a real one: hill towns run around 400 metres, mountain towns around 800 and inside a named range. A cliff town above the sea counts as coastal, because the sea is why you would go.
375 towns
Hill towns
The ridge and hilltop borghi, sitting around 400 metres. Vineyards below, one road up, walkable once you are there. Good in almost any season.
Pictured: Montalcino
223 towns
Mountain towns
Towns inside a named range: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Apennines, the Pollino, the Aspromonte. Around 800 metres and up, where the season decides the trip.
Pictured: Calascio
193 towns
Coastal towns
Towns on the sea. A cliff town high above the water counts here rather than under mountains, because the sea is why you would go.
Pictured: Maratea
54 towns
Lake towns
Towns on the northern lakes and the quieter volcanic ones further south. Water without the coast road.
Pictured: Varenna
18 towns
Islands
Towns you reach by ferry. Small catalogue, and the getting there is most of the point.
Pictured: Procida
The slow-trip planner
Plan a slow trip across the towns travelers skip.
Answer five questions. We will shape a geographically coherent slow trip from the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip. Yours to save and share.
From across Italy
Five towns to begin with
Bernalda
Province: Matera
A 127-meter hill town between the Bradano and Basento, Francis Ford Coppola's ancestral home, holding the Magna Graecia columns of the Tavole Palatine.
Pietracamela
Province: Teramo
A village of 218 people clinging at 1,005 meters under the north wall of Corno Piccolo, birthplace of Italian Apennine climbing in 1925.
Dozza
Province: Bologna
A 190-meter painted borgo above the Sellustra valley, where contemporary artists have repainted the house walls every two years since 1960.
Gangi
Province: Palermo
A Madonie hill town stacked in concentric rings at 1,011 meters, RAI's Borgo dei Borghi 2014 and the launching pad for the one-euro-house programme.
Gravina in Puglia
Province: Bari
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.