Italian Villages: How to Choose One, and What to Do When You Get There

Italy has 5,519 municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents, almost seventy percent of the total. Most visitors see none of them, because the famous itinerary runs between five cities and the villages are in the spaces in between. Anyone who has a car and three spare days can change that, and the difference between a village that is worth the drive and one that is not comes down to a handful of things you can check before you go.

What counts as a village

The Italian word is borgo, and it does not translate cleanly. It means a small settlement with a historic core, usually walled or built on a defensible site, usually medieval in layout even when the buildings are older or newer. A borgo can be a comune of 300 people or a quarter of a larger town, like Ragusa Ibla inside Ragusa.

What it is not is a theme park, and that distinction is the whole point of choosing well.

The lists, and what they are worth

I Borghi più belli d'Italia, the most beautiful villages in Italy, is an association founded in March 2001 on the initiative of the tourism board of ANCI, the national association of Italian municipalities. It now has more than three hundred member towns, admitted against criteria on architectural integrity, urban quality and services. A village on that list will have a coherent historic center and will have made an effort.

Bandiere arancioni, the orange flags awarded by the Touring Club Italiano, work similarly for inland towns, with more weight on how a visitor is actually received.

Both are useful filters and neither is a guarantee. A list tells you that the stone is in good order. It does not tell you whether anybody lives there.

How to choose one

Six questions, in order of how much they matter.

1. Is it inhabited? Look for a school, a pharmacy, a butcher, more than one bar. A village with a functioning post office at nine in the morning is a different experience from one with three souvenir shops and a ticket booth.

2. How far is it from where you sleep? Under an hour each way. Villages are a half-day pleasure, and a two-hour drive turns them into an obligation.

3. Is there a market day? Market morning is when a small town is most itself. It is usually one weekday, it starts at seven and it is over by one.

4. Can you walk it? Most are built on hills with stepped lanes. Look at the elevation and at where the parking is: many have a lot at the bottom and a lift or a shuttle, and some do not.

5. Is there one thing to see? A castle, a fresco, a cloister, a viewpoint. One is enough, and it gives the walk a destination.

6. What is it near? The best day pairs two villages with a lunch in between, or one village and a landscape.

What to do when you get there

Not much, deliberately, and in this order.

Coffee at the bar in the piazza, standing up, which costs a euro and a half and buys you the sight of the whole town going about its morning.

The church, which is usually open in the morning, sometimes locked in the afternoon, and often has something in it that would have a queue in a city.

The walk to the edge. Every hill town has a belvedere, a point where the houses stop and the valley opens. It is always signposted and always worth it.

Lunch, which is the main event. Eat where the tables have locals at them, order what the region makes, and expect it to take two hours.

The passeggiata, if you stay until six, when the town comes out to walk up and down the main street before dinner.

Two practical warnings. Between one and four in the afternoon, shops close and streets empty: that is not a bad day, that is Italy. And on Mondays many restaurants and some museums are shut.

What is disappointing about villages

This deserves saying, because the photographs do not.

Some are very quiet, to the point of feeling empty. Some have a single bar that closes at eight. Some are beautiful for twenty minutes and then finished. Very few have anything to buy that is worth carrying home. English is rarely spoken, and in a village that is a feature rather than a problem, but it does mean that a phrasebook or a translation app earns its place.

If you visit three in a day, they blur. Two is the maximum, and one plus a long lunch is better.

The empty ones

Italy is losing its small towns. Between 2011 and 2025, more than 2,300 municipalities lost at least ten percent of their population, and in 2025 over 1,800 recorded a negative demographic balance for the tenth consecutive year.

Some have emptied entirely. Craco, in Basilicata, was abandoned after landslides and is now visited with a helmet and a guide. Civita di Bagnoregio, in northern Lazio, has a dozen residents and half a million visitors a year, reached across a footbridge: the most photographed village in Italy and, for exactly that reason, not a quiet one.

Abandoned villages are worth seeing once. They are not what a trip should be built on, and there is a difference between a place that ended and a place that is still going.

Is Italy really offering money to move there?

Yes, in specific places, under conditions, and not to tourists.

The best known scheme is the sale of derelict houses for one euro, run by individual municipalities that want their centers repopulated. The buyer commits to renovating within a set period, posts a deposit, and pays for the work, which usually runs into tens of thousands of euros. It is a real program and it is not a bargain unless you want a building project in a small Italian town.

Some regions go further. Calabria has offered up to 28,000 euros to people under 40 who move their residence to one of a short list of municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, within 90 days, coming from a larger town or from abroad. Other regions run comparable schemes with their own conditions.

None of this affects a two-week visit. It matters only if you are seriously considering living in one, and in that case the first step is spending a low-season month in the town rather than a weekend.

Five villages in Ciociaria

The hill country south of Rome, an hour and a half from the capital, is where our own journeys spend their time, and it is one of the least visited parts of central Italy. Our guide to Ciociaria explains the region; these are its villages.

Alvito sits on a slope under a ruined castle, with a view over the whole Comino valley and an eighteenth century theater in a town of three thousand people.

Isola del Liri has a waterfall in the middle of the town. The Liri splits around the rock the old center stands on, and the Cascata Grande, about 27 meters high, falls directly below the castle, which makes it one of the very few towns in Europe with a waterfall in its historic center.

Posta Fibreno has a lake with a floating island on it: a mat of peat and roots that moves slowly across the water, mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the first century and now inside a regional nature reserve.

Alatri and Arpino are the two with prehistoric walls, and our guide to Alatri and Arpino covers what is up there and how old it really is.

Add Anagni for the popes and Fiuggi for the water, and that is a week without leaving a fifty kilometer circle.

Four in eastern Sicily

Castelmola, above Taormina, is small, steep and sits higher than the view everyone photographs.

Savoca and Forza d'Agrò, in the hills behind the coast, were used as the Sicilian village in The Godfather, and our guide to the filming locations covers what is real and what is not.

Ragusa Ibla is the lower half of Ragusa, rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693 and now the most complete baroque town in the southeast.

Visiting villages without a car

It is hard, and any article that says otherwise is not being straight with you. Buses exist, they run once or twice a day, they are timed for schoolchildren, and there are none on Sunday. Trains reach a few of these places and stop far below most of them.

The realistic options are: rent a car for the days you want the countryside and leave it behind for the cities; hire a driver for one or two days, which costs less than Americans expect and solves the traffic zones; or travel with a group that has the driving arranged.

That last one is what we do. Our journey in Ciociaria spends its days between villages, a waterfall, a lake and a cheesemaker, and the villages and slow walks experience is exactly this article turned into a day, with the parking, the timing and the lunch already solved.

One village, properly

The best version of this is not a list of ten. It is one village, on a weekday, arriving at nine and leaving at six: the bar, the market, the church, the walk to the edge, a long lunch, an hour doing nothing in a square, and the drive back with the light going.

That is the day our journeys are built around, and it is also the day you can build yourself with a map and a car. If you want it built for you, in a part of Italy where it still happens naturally, start at Design your trip.