Designation
Bandiera Lilla
38 towns across 14 regions
Browse by region
Abruzzo2
Alba Adriatica
Province: Teramo · 5 m
The northernmost of the Teramo coast's seven sisters, a 1956 spin-off from Tortoreto with a fine-sand beach known as the Spiaggia d'Argento.
Roseto degli Abruzzi
Province: Teramo · 8 m
An Adriatic beach town of 25,500 with ten kilometers of low-rise sand, a hilltop frazione at 285 meters, and Blue Flags since 1995.
Basilicata2
Pisticci
Province: Matera · 364 m
A hill town at 364 meters above the Ionian, rebuilt in three hundred identical white houses after the 1688 landslide killed four hundred.
Policoro
Province: Matera · 25 m
A Ionian-coast town on the Gulf of Taranto built on the ruins of the Greek polis of Heraclea — birthplace of the Tavole di Eraclea bronze inscriptions and home to one of the region's most-visited Bandiera Blu beaches and the National Museum of the Siritide.
Liguria9
- ✷ We've been
Camogli
Province: Genova · 32 m
A fishing village on the Golfo Paradiso whose nineteenth-century fleet of a thousand white sails made it Italy's third maritime power in the Mediterranean.
Diano
Province: Imperia · 70 m
A twin destination on the Riviera dei Fiori — the medieval hilltop borgo of Diano Castello above and the palm-fronted beach resort of Diano Marina below — sharing one Bay of Diano, one Taggiasca olive valley, and the longest Bandiera Blu beach in western Liguria.
Finale Ligure
Province: Savona · 12 m
Three boroughs on the Gulf of Genoa, with walled Finalborgo as the Del Carretto seat and a Bandiera Blu beachfront below.
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.
Loano
Province: Savona · 13 m
A Doria fief on the Savona coast with a Renaissance palace, a Roman imperial mosaic, and a top-ten world marina.
Pietra Ligure
Province: Savona · 4 m
A Riviera di Ponente town named after the seventh-century castle on its rock, with one of the largest flower carpets in Europe every three years.
Santa Margherita Ligure
Province: Genova · 13 m
The Tigullio town that kept its fishing port while the world drove past on the way to Portofino two kilometers further.
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Sarzana
Province: La Spezia · 21 m
The unofficial capital of the Lunigiana on the Magra plain, birthplace of Pope Niccolò V and home to Italy's oldest dated painted crucifix.
Savona
Province: Savona · 4 m
A working port city with two Della Rovere popes, a Sistine Chapel that came before the Roman one, and a fortress on the old town.
Lombardy3
Gardone Riviera
Province: Brescia · 71 m
A western Garda lakeshore town whose hillside holds the Vittoriale, the estate Gabriele D'Annunzio turned into a monument to himself.
Limone sul Garda
Province: Brescia · 65 m
The northernmost lemon-growing town in the world, at 46 degrees north on the western shore of Lake Garda, reached by road only in 1932.
Sirmione
Province: Brescia · 91 m
A 4-kilometer peninsula reaching into the southern Garda, with the Scaliger fortified port and the Roman villa called the Grotte di Catullo at its tip.
Marche6
Grottammare
Province: Ascoli Piceno · 4 m
A double town on the Riviera delle Palme, with a palm-lined seafront and the medieval Paese Alto where Pope Sixtus V was born.
Mercatello sul Metauro
Province: Pesaro e Urbino · 429 m
A walled borgo at 429 meters in the upper Metauro, autonomous since 1235, with a pieve exempt from any bishop.
Mondolfo
Province: Pesaro e Urbino · 144 m
A walled hill borgo at 144 meters above the Adriatic, with the frazione of Marotta and its Bandiera Blu beach below.
Porto San Giorgio
Province: Fermo · 5 m
A 15,000-resident Bandiera Blu beach town on the Adriatic between Ancona and Pescara, with one of the largest tourist marinas in the central Adriatic, the medieval Rocca Tiepolo above the harbour, and a long fine-sand seafront under date palms.
Sassoferrato
Province: Ancona · 386 m
A two-level Apennine town above Roman Sentinum, where the consuls Decius Mus and Fabius Maximus defeated four allied tribes in 295 BC.
Senigallia
Province: Ancona · 5 m
Thirteen kilometers of fine sand on the Adriatic that earned the Spiaggia di Velluto name, hometown of photographer Mario Giacomelli and chef Mauro Uliassi.
Sardinia2
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.
Santa Teresa Gallura
Province: Sassari · 44 m
The northernmost town in Sardinia, founded in 1808 on a Turin-style grid above the Strait of Bonifacio and 11 kilometers from Corsica.
Sicily4
Geraci Siculo
Province: Palermo · 1,077 m
A Madonie ridge village at 1,077 meters, capital of the Ventimiglia marquisate from 1258 and the first marquisate granted in Sicily.
Modica
Province: Ragusa · 296 m
A vertical Baroque city in the Hyblean Mountains, rebuilt from the 1693 earthquake and home to a chocolate recipe brought from Aztec Mexico.
San Vito Lo Capo
Province: Trapani · 5 m
A three-kilometer white-sand beach under Monte Monaco at Sicily's northwest tip, the town that turned cous cous into a September festival.
Savoca
Province: Messina · 300 m
A hilltop borgo at 300 meters above the Ionian where Francis Ford Coppola filmed the Sicilian scenes of The Godfather in 1971.
Tuscany3
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Castiglione della Pescaia
Province: Grosseto · 4 m
A Maremma seaside town under an Aragonese castle, with the Vetulonia necropolis behind it, the Diaccia Botrona wetland beside it, and Italo Calvino buried on the hill.
- ✷ We've been
Monte Argentario
Province: Grosseto · 5 m
A 635-meter peninsula tied to the mainland by three sand spits, ringed by Spanish forts and the place where Caravaggio died in 1610.
Peccioli
Province: Pisa · 144 m
Borgo dei Borghi 2024 in the Valdera hills, a medieval village that funded a public contemporary-art program with revenue from its landfill plant.
Veneto2
Malcesine
Province: Verona · 89 m
The northernmost Veneto town on Lake Garda, where Goethe was nearly arrested for sketching the Castello Scaligero in September 1786.
Valeggio sul Mincio
Province: Verona · 88 m
A moraine-hills town at 88 meters between Garda and Mantua, with a 1393 Visconti bridge-dam over the Mincio and a tortellino called the love knot.
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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.