Borghi più belli d'Italia
Borghi più belli d'Italia in Friuli-Venezia Giulia
13 towns
Friuli-Venezia Giulia carries 13 of the Borghi più belli d'Italia towns we cover. They cluster in the Pordenone, Udine, and Gorizia provinces.
The three most recognised in our catalogue are Cividale del Friuli, Frisanco, and Sappada. 10 more towns carry the mark alongside them.
Cividale del Friuli
Province: Udine · 138 m
The Lombard capital on the Natisone, founded as Forum Iulii by Julius Caesar, where an eighth-century chapel still holds six stucco saints.
Frisanco
Province: Pordenone · 415 m
A 572-resident commune in the Val Colvera whose frazione Poffabro, at 525 meters, became a model of Prealpine stone-and-wood vernacular architecture.
Sappada
Province: Udine · 1,250 m
A German-speaking alpine village at 1,250 meters near the source of the Piave, settled from East Tyrol in the eleventh century and Italian since 1852.
Venzone
Province: Udine · 230 m
A 230-meter walled medieval town in the Tagliamento valley, leveled by the 1976 earthquake and rebuilt stone by stone, winner of Borgo dei Borghi 2017.
Cervignano del Friuli
Province: Udine · 5 m
The capital of Bassa Friulana on the Ausa river, an inland river port for Aquileia in 181 BC and a railway junction since 1860.
Gradisca d'Isonzo
Province: Gorizia · 32 m
A 1479 Venetian bastion on the right bank of the Isonzo, with seven towers, twenty-meter walls, and a Habsburg court inside.
Palmanova
Province: Udine · 26 m
A nine-pointed Venetian star fortress founded 7 October 1593, designed as a perfect Renaissance city and finished, in three phases, under Napoleon in 1813.
Sesto al Reghena
Province: Pordenone · 13 m
A 730s Benedictine abbey on the Reghena, ravaged by Magyars in 899, refortified in the tenth century, and still the town hall today.
Spilimbergo
Province: Pordenone · 132 m
A 132-meter Friulian town on the Tagliamento, home since 1922 to the Scuola Mosaicisti, whose alumni made the Library of Congress mosaics.
Cordovado
Province: Pordenone · 15 m
A 15-meter Friulian village in the Pordenone plain, fortified by the bishops of Concordia as their summer seat and described in Ippolito Nievo's Confessions.
Fagagna
Province: Udine · 177 m
A 177-meter Friulian hill town northwest of Udine, fortified by Otto II in 983 and racing donkeys in the piazza since 1891.
Polcenigo
Province: Pordenone · 40 m
A 40-meter village at the foot of the Carnic Prealps where the Livenza rises, neighbour to the UNESCO Palù pile-dwelling site occupied since 4900 BC.
Valvasone Arzene
Province: Pordenone · 57 m
A medieval borgo at 57 meters on the Tagliamento's right bank, organized around a castle and a Duomo with a 1532 Italian-built organ.
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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.