I borghi più belli d'Italia
The goal of our Club, which was not created merely as an integrated tourist promotional operation, is to guarantee - through protection, restoration, promotion and utilization - the preservation of a great heritage of monuments and memories that would otherwise be irretrievably lost. http://www.borghitalia.it/
Italian little Italies: Sabbioneta The ideal city of the Renaissance
Enlightenment scholars called Sabbioneta “the little Athens of the Po”, considering it as the true Renaissance “ideal city”, it is actually a “little Rome” created by the maecenas prince Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna on the model of ancient Roman cities. Vespasiano, being viceroy of Navarre, had already designed the citadel of Pamplona in Spain, and w...
Italian little Italies: Barga, the Cypresses of Arringo over the Valley of Poetry
The urban structure of Barga has remained more or less that of the time of the Commune (12th-14th cent.), with a tangled network of streets running between the irregular buildings. One enters the village through Porta Reale and Via del Pretorio, crossed by narrow lanes and cart-roads. Past the first square is the Conservatorio di Sant’Elisabetta, a...
Italian little Italies: Cison di Valmarino, Veneto villas and prosecco vineyards
The borgo of Cison di Valmarino is dominated by the Brandolini castle (today a luxury hotel), called in the middle ages Castrum Costae. The fortified complex (XII century) was transformed by Brandolini with the addition of the Renaissance wing and the building of the external walls and ramparts. It was Antonio Maria Brandolini, who died in 1530, to...
Italian little Italies: Pacentro. Return to the Middle Ages
The mountains press against Pacentro to the point of reducing its horizon, but in compensation they shelter the Borgo from the fury of the winds. The woods oxygenate the air and water gushes fresh water from the numerous springs of the Maiella. To the west, the sky over Pacentro widens, and the view sweeps over the Peligna Valley. At the summit of...
Italian little Italies: Compiano, The village of wanderers
Compiano stands on a rocky spur rising on the left bank of the Taro River, in Emilia Romagna but wedged between Liguria and Tuscany. The ancient village is dominated by a castle whose origins are uncertain: restoration work carried out in 1994, however, uncovered buildings dating back to before the eighth century A.D.. In later years the expansion...
Italian little Italies: Sambuca di Sicilia. The fortress of Al-Zabut
The town's urban development follows two lines: the Arab one "inside the walls," which is projected through the sixteenth century with the thickening of residences around the fortress of Zabut, and the seventeenth-eighteenth-century one "outside the walls," with the town hall acting as a hinge. The tour begins at the 19th-century L'Idea theater at...
Italian little Italies: Valvasone Arzene. Small ancient world
The urban center of Valvasone developed on the right bank of the Tagliamento River in the Friulian plain, near an ancient ford. We begin our visit from the Town Hall, a stately building with an 18th-century appearance that overlooks Piazza Mercato, incorporating earlier medieval structures. Opposite, Palazzo Martinuzzi-Dulio does not hide its Venet...
Italian little Italies: Mondolfo. An Adriatic fortress
The heart of the Borgo is the large central square dominated by the Town Hall, which was built with the civic tower in neo-gothic style in 1931. Next to it, the parish church of Santa Giustina, already attested in 1290, was renovated and elected a Collegiate Church by Pope Urban VIII in 1635. In the elegant cantoria located above the main entrance,...
Italian little Italies: Summonte. The wine port of the Romans
The grange (ancient barn) of Santa Maria del Preposito is the most important element of Summonte territory. It dates back to the tenth century and was sold in exchange to the abbey of Montevergine around 1174, from 1229 became the aggregation of the new Fontanelle farmhouse. The monastic structure has promoted the cultivation of chestnut, vine, oli...
Italian little Italies: Presicce, the triumph of Baroque
You can start your visit of the historical center from via Roma, where the municipal offices are housed in the convent of the Carmelite Fathers, finished in 1590. In the adjacent church of Madonna del Carmine (second half of the XVI century) the main altar carved in local leccese stone has columns, tunnels and basreliefs in late Baroque style and t...
Italian little Italies: Corciano, silence and beauty
Corciano is located midway between Perugia and Lake Trasimeno, at the top of a hill overlooking the valley that links Tuscany and the Trasimeno area with the Tiber River valley. The original castrum was built in the Middle Ages, and is the “hilltop” type, with a concentric street system, enclosed within three circuits of defense walls (13th-14th ce...
Italian little Italies: Orta San Giulio, God's watercolor
Arriving from Gozzano, the lakefront that heralds Orta is full of 19th-century neoclassical mansions with gardens blooming with azaleas and camellias. One enters the village among elegant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions with open loggias on the gardens sloping down to the lake. Piazza Motta is a living room enclosed on three sides by p...