I Borghi Più Belli d'Italia: The Hidden Villages That Make You Fall in Love With Italy

The real Italy is not Rome or Florence or Venice — or rather, it is not only those cities. The real Italy is also the hilltop village in Umbria where the only sound at noon is a church bell and the hiss of a boiling pot. It is the coastal village in Liguria where the steps are so steep they have been worn concave by 800 years of feet. It is the medieval walled town in Basilicata where the main piazza has a fountain, three old men on a bench, and a cat asleep on the post office steps. Since 2001, an association called 'I Borghi Più Belli d'Italia' has been identifying, celebrating, and protecting Italy's most beautiful small villages. There are now over 350 of them, spread across every region. Each one is a world.

The borghi listed by the association must meet strict criteria: they must have fewer than 15,000 inhabitants, they must have preserved their historic urban fabric, and they must have specific 'cultural assets' — architecture, traditions, crafts, or landscape. The association was inspired by a French model (Les Plus Beaux Villages de France) and has been remarkably successful at directing visitors to lesser-known places. Some borghi that were nearly forgotten — Civita di Bagnoregio in Lazio, Bobbio in Emilia-Romagna, Tropea in Calabria, Spello in Umbria — have been revitalised and are now significant destinations in their own right. Others remain delightfully, defiantly obscure — knowable only to those who take the time to find them.

The question of why Italy has so many of these preserved medieval villages is worth understanding. Unlike northern Europe, where many small historic towns were rebuilt, modernised, or destroyed in the industrial revolution and two world wars, large parts of southern and central Italy remained outside the main currents of 20th-century development. Poverty, remoteness, and the collapse of the agricultural economy led not to demolition but to abandonment. Villages that could not sustain themselves economically simply emptied. The people left; the buildings remained. When restoration came — from private investors, from EU rural development funds, from the albergo diffuso movement — they found stone houses, medieval streets, and fortified churches that had been preserved not by design but by neglect. The Italy that urban Italians sometimes call 'arretrata' (backward) turned out to contain some of the finest untouched historic architecture in Europe.

Some personal favourites from the list: Bosa in Sardinia, a colourful riverside town with a Malaspina castle above it and a small fishing harbour below; Spello in Umbria, where every spring the streets are carpeted with flowers for the Infiorata festival; Santo Stefano di Sessanio in Abruzzo, a mountain village at 1,250 metres that was bought and carefully restored by entrepreneur Daniele Kihlgren into a 'diffuse hotel' — the Sextantio — spread through the whole village; Pitigliano in Tuscany, a medieval town built on a tuff outcrop above a deep gorge, nicknamed 'Little Jerusalem' for its historic Jewish community that arrived after the 1492 Spanish expulsion; and Gradara in the Marche, the perfectly intact walled castle-town where the tragic love story of Paolo and Francesca — immortalised by Dante in the fifth canto of the Inferno — is said to have taken place.