Region
Lazio
Lazio's 60 towns in our catalogue split across the Viterbo, Roma, and Latina provinces; 24 carry the Borghi più belli d'Italia designation.
60 towns · highest: Collalto Sabino 980m · smallest: Percile 219 people
60 of 60 towns
60 of 60 towns

Acquapendente
Province: Viterbo
The northernmost town in Lazio on the Via Francigena, at 420 meters above the Paglia, named in 964 for its waterfalls.

Amatrice
Province: Rieti
A 955-meter Apennine town leveled by the 24 August 2016 earthquake, slowly rebuilding the streets that gave amatriciana its name.

Anagni
Province: Frosinone
The hill town in Ciociaria where Sciarra Colonna struck Pope Boniface VIII in September 1303, ending the medieval claim to papal supremacy.

Anguillara Sabazia
Province: Roma
A medieval cape town jutting into Lake Bracciano, twenty-five kilometers from Rome, built above a 5700 BC Neolithic lakeshore village.

Ariccia
Province: Roma
The Castelli Romani town where you go for porchetta — a Bernini-designed Baroque ensemble (palazzo + Santa Maria dell'Assunzione + Piazza di Corte) on a volcanic crater rim 25 km south of Rome, with the most concentrated cluster of fraschette porchetta restaurants in Italy and Lago di Albano below.

Arpino
Province: Frosinone
The Volscian-Roman hill town in the Liri valley that produced Marius and Cicero, with a pre-Roman acropolis above the modern center.

Atina
Province: Frosinone
A polygonal-walled town in the Val di Comino at the foot of the Mainarde, and the DOC that makes Cabernet in central Italy.

Bagnoregio
Province: Viterbo
The Etruscan-founded hill town in Tuscia whose frazione Civita di Bagnoregio sits on an eroding tuff plateau, reachable only by footbridge.

Bassano in Teverina
Province: Viterbo
A tufa-spur borgo of 1,260 above the Tiber valley between Lazio and Umbria, with a clock tower that hides an eleventh-century animated bell tower.

Bassiano
Province: Latina
The highest village in the province of Latina at 562 meters, birthplace of Aldo Manuzio, who shrank the book to pocket size.

Bolsena
Province: Viterbo
A medieval town at 350 meters on the eastern shore of Europe's largest volcanic lake, where a Bohemian priest reported a Eucharistic miracle in 1263.

Bomarzo
Province: Viterbo
The Tuscia village below the Sacro Bosco, the 16th-century stone-monster garden built by a grieving condottiero for his dead wife.

Boville Ernica
Province: Frosinone
A Ciociaria hilltop town with eighteen intact medieval towers and Giotto's only surviving mosaic, the Angelo del Navicella, in San Pietro Ispano.

Bracciano
Province: Roma
The Lazio lake town with the eighth-largest lake in Italy below it and one of the best-preserved Renaissance castles in the country above it.

Calcata
Province: Viterbo
A tufa-cliff village forty kilometers north of Rome, condemned and abandoned in the 1930s, then occupied by artists and never left.

Canale Monterano
Province: Roma
A hilltop village next to the burned ghost town of Monterano, where Bernini's San Bonaventura and the Baroque fountain stand roofless.

Capodimonte
Province: Viterbo
The lakefront Farnese stronghold on Lago di Bolsena — a small Tuscia borgo on a peninsula jutting into Europe's largest volcanic crater lake, with Antonio da Sangallo's octagonal Rocca Farnese, an extra-virgin olive oil tradition (Città dell'Olio), and views across the water to the inhabited Isola Bisentina.

Capranica
Province: Viterbo
A medieval hill town on the old Via Cassia, taken by the Anguillara family in 1305 and remembered as the place Petrarch stayed in 1337.

Capranica Prenestina
Province: Roma
A 915-meter ridge village on the Monti Prenestini east of Rome, with the Mentorella sanctuary at 1,018 meters above the Giovenzano valley.

Caprarola
Province: Viterbo
A Cimini hill town above Lago di Vico, dominated by the pentagonal Villa Farnese that Vignola built for the Farnese cardinals between 1559 and 1573.

Casperia
Province: Rieti
A Sabina hill village named Aspra in Virgil's Aeneid, called that until 1947, ringed by walls from 1282 and Sabina DOP olive groves below.

Castel di Tora
Province: Rieti
A village of 266 on Lago del Turano at 607 meters, with an eleventh-century polygonal tower and a ghost promontory called Antuni.

Castel Gandolfo
Province: Roma
A papal town on the rim of Lake Albano's volcanic crater, summer residence of the popes since 1626 in the Castelli Romani.

Castel San Pietro Romano
Province: Roma
A 763-meter hill village on Monte Ginestro above Palestrina, sitting on the acropolis of ancient Praeneste and inside the Colonna fortress walls.

Castelnuovo di Porto
Province: Roma
A tufa-ridge borgo twenty-five kilometers north of Rome inside the Parco di Veio, dominated by the Rocca Colonna above the Tiber valley.

Castro dei Volsci
Province: Frosinone
A Ciociaria hilltop borgo at 385 meters in the Sacco valley, named for the pre-Roman Volsci and birthplace of actor Nino Manfredi.

Cerveteri
Province: Roma
An Etruscan capital seven kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast, with the Banditaccia necropolis holding 1,000 tombs in the largest ancient cemetery in the Mediterranean.

Collalto Sabino
Province: Rieti
A 980-meter Sabine borgo dominated by a Barberini baronial castle, with a 360-degree panorama from the keep over the Gran Sasso, Terminillo and Maiella.

Fiuggi
Province: Frosinone
The Ernici-mountain thermal town where Boniface VIII and Michelangelo both came to dissolve kidney stones with the oligomineral spring water.

Fondi
Province: Latina
The plain town between the Ausoni and Aurunci mountains where the Caetani built a castle in the middle of farmland instead of on a hill.

Gaeta
Province: Latina
The promontory port where the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fell in February 1861 and the south of Italy stopped existing as a state.

Greccio
Province: Rieti
A 705-meter borgo above the Rieti valley where Francis of Assisi staged the first living nativity scene in a cliff cave on Christmas Eve 1223.

Isola del Liri
Province: Frosinone
The Ciociaria town with a 27-meter waterfall in its centro storico and a paper-mill past once called the Manchester of Italy.

Labro
Province: Rieti
A 355-person stone borgo at 628 meters above Lake Piediluco, restored since the 1960s by a Belgian architect and his descendants.

Magliano Sabina
Province: Rieti
A 222-meter Sabine town on a Tiber terrace facing Monte Soratte, cathedral seat of the Sabina diocese on the Lazio-Umbria border.

Minturno
Province: Latina
A coastal comune at the mouth of the Garigliano, built on the Roman colony of Minturnae, five-time Bandiera Blu through Scauri and Marina.

Montefiascone
Province: Viterbo
A 590-meter hill town on the southeastern rim of Lake Bolsena, the source of Est! Est!! Est!!! and a Via Francigena stop.

Nemi
Province: Roma
The smallest comune in the Castelli Romani, perched at 521 meters above a volcanic crater lake the Romans called the mirror of Diana.

Oriolo Romano
Province: Viterbo
A planned sixteenth-century village in the Sabatini hills, founded in 1560 by a Santacroce nobleman next to the UNESCO beech forest of Monte Raschio.

Orvinio
Province: Rieti
The highest borgo in the Monti Lucretili park at 840 meters, called Canemorto until 1863 and dominated by the Castello Malvezzi-Campeggi.

Percile
Province: Roma
A 219-person medieval borgo at 575 meters in the Monti Lucretili park, with two karst lakes called Lagustelli hidden in the beech woods above.

Picinisco
Province: Frosinone
A medieval village at 725 meters above the Val di Comino, the source of much of Italo-Scottish emigration and of Pecorino di Picinisco DOP.

Pico
Province: Frosinone
Tommaso Landolfi's home town — a 2,634-resident Ciociaria borgo at 220m on the Monti Ausoni between Rome and Naples, with the Castello Baronale dei Boncompagni (now the Casa Museo Tommaso Landolfi for the eccentric 20th-c Italian fantastic-realism writer), a BPB-inscribed medieval centro, and the surrounding Monti Ausoni hiking + wild boar country.

Ponza
Province: Latina
The main island of the Pontine archipelago — a volcanic crescent 40 km off Formia with the white tuff cliffs of Chiaia di Luna, the 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.

Ronciglione
Province: Viterbo
A tufa-brick borgo above Lake Vico at 441 meters, fortified by the Prefects of Vico and crowned Borgo dei Borghi in 2023.

Sabaudia
Province: Latina
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
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
A medieval borgo on the flank of Monte Circeo, the 540-meter promontory Homer made the home of Circe in the Odyssey.

Sermoneta
Province: Latina
A walled medieval town on a Lepini spur above the Pontine Plain, the Caetani stronghold whose 42-meter Maschio has stood since 1297.

Sperlonga
Province: Latina
A whitewashed cliff town on Monte San Magno halfway between Rome and Naples, built above the sea grotto where Tiberius staged the Odyssey in marble.

Subiaco
Province: Roma
The Aniene valley town where Benedict spent three years in a cliff cave, and where Italy's first printed book appeared in 1465.

Sutri
Province: Viterbo
An Etruscan and Roman town on a tuff spur, with a rock-cut amphitheater carved straight from the volcanic stone of the Cimini.

Tarquinia
Province: Viterbo
An Etruscan capital on a Maremma ridge whose 6,000 rock-cut tombs at Monterozzi hold the largest body of pre-Roman painting in the Mediterranean.

Terracina
Province: Latina
The Volscian Anxur on the Via Appia, where Jupiter's temple sits 227 meters above a port Trajan cleared through stone.

Tivoli
Province: Roma
A travertine town on the Aniene falls twenty-five kilometers east of Rome, holding two separate UNESCO sites: Hadrian's villa below and the Villa d'Este above.

Trevignano Romano
Province: Roma
A volcanic-crater lake town on the northern shore of Bracciano, thirty-five kilometers from Rome, with a medieval rocca above the water.

Velletri
Province: Roma
The Castelli Romani town where Augustus grew up, now the largest wine commune in the Alban Hills.

Ventotene
Province: Latina
The smaller of the inhabited Pontine Islands, a flat three-kilometer tuff platform where Altiero Spinelli drafted the federalist Manifesto in 1941.

Viterbo
Province: Viterbo
The medieval capital of the Tuscia, papal seat for five popes between 1257 and 1281 and home to the longest conclave in Church history.

Vitorchiano
Province: Viterbo
A peperino borgo built on a single volcanic boulder near Viterbo, and the only place outside Easter Island with a true Moai.
Subscribe — free
Get the best guides on hidden Italian towns.
One letter on Sundays. The week’s town, with the photo, the food, the festa. Free, by Peter & Sophia from Pietrasanta.
Substack sends a confirmation link to your inbox. The signup finishes when it’s clicked.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover

Pieve di Soligo
Province: Treviso
The market town between the Soligo and Lierza rivers in the Prosecco UNESCO zone, birthplace of the twentieth-century poet Andrea Zanzotto.

Vallefoglia
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
A 2014 merger commune at 295 meters in the Foglia valley, born from Colbordolo, birthplace of Raffaello's father, and Sant'Angelo in Lizzola.

Abano Terme
Province: Padova
Europe's oldest thermal town on the Euganean Hills' eastern slope, where 80°C bromo-iodine springs have been drawing bathers since the eighth century BC.

Bosa
Province: Oristano
A colour-washed riverside town on Sardinia's only navigable river, with a Malaspina castle on the hill and the tanneries of Sas Conzas along the Temo.

Castagnole delle Lanze
Province: Asti
An Asti hill town at 298 meters between Langhe and Monferrato, with two Baroque churches and a nineteenth-century astronomical tower.
