The most beautiful places in Italy to visit in 2026

From Venice's Grand Canal to the three sheer Dolomite rock towers that define the Alps at their most dramatic

Stefano Casarini / Unsplash

Italy’s beauty problem is one of abundance: there are too many extraordinary places to see in a single trip, or several trips, or over a lifetime of dedicated travel. The country holds more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other nation on earth, which is one quantitative expression of a qualitative reality that every visitor encounters immediately: the density of cultural, architectural, and natural beauty in Italy is unlike anywhere else. A 20-minute walk through central Rome passes more historically significant structures than most cities contain in their entirety. A drive through the Val d’Orcia in Tuscany produces a continuous landscape of such composed beauty that it is difficult to believe the rolling hills and cypress rows were not arranged deliberately for the aesthetic pleasure of passing observers.

The range of what Italy offers is also exceptional. The Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna’s sixth-century basilica and the volcanic black-sand beaches of the Aeolian Islands are both in Italy, separated by 600 miles of peninsula, and entirely different in every characteristic except the beauty they produce in the people who encounter them. The cave hotels of Matera, carved into a hillside that has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, and the Gothic marble facade of Milan’s cathedral are both in Italy. The country contains multitudes, and the visitor who approaches it with specific intention, mountain lakes, baroque stone carving, and ancient Greek temples, will find the specific thing in better form than anywhere else in the world.

The 10 destinations below appear in Travel Leisure, drawn from a list of 35 covering all 20 of Italy’s regions. They span the full length of the peninsula and include both the most celebrated and some of the most overlooked, covering Venice and Rome alongside Ravenna’s mosaics and Basilicata’s cave city.

1. Venice’s Grand Canal has no equal on earth

Henrique Ferreira / Unsplash

Venice is the city that the most jaded traveler cannot dismiss. The crowds are real, the tourist restaurants are mediocre, and the acqua alta flooding is increasingly disruptive. None of this changes the fundamental reality that the Grand Canal, the wide, serpentine waterway that divides the city and serves as its main artery, is one of the most extraordinary urban environments ever created, and that no photograph or description or prior visitor’s account prepares the first-time visitor for the experience of arriving by boat and watching the palaces slide past on both sides of the water. The canal’s 3.8-kilometer length is lined with more than 170 buildings spanning the 13th through 18th centuries, offering a continuous architectural survey of Venetian building culture over 500 years.

The gondola ride is the obvious tourist activity, and it is obvious for a reason: the canal’s perspective from water level, looking up at the palazzo facades and the laundry strung between windows and the cats on the stone steps leading down to the water, is not available from the bridges or the embankments in the same terms. The sunset hour on the canal gives the best light, with the western sky turning the palazzo facades orange and the water reflecting the color back. The Rialto Bridge and the Ca’ d’Oro palazzo are the canal's two most photographed structures, and both are best seen at off-peak hours or from a moving vaporetto, not amid the foot traffic at the busier crossing points.

The canal’s morning atmosphere, before the day-tripper crowds arrive from the mainland, gives Venice its most specifically beautiful quality: the water traffic of supply boats, the fish market on the Rialto bank, and the mist that sits on the lagoon in the early hours give the canal a working city character that the afternoon’s tourist saturation replaces with something closer to a theme park. Booking accommodation inside the old city, not on the mainland, makes this specific version of Venice available to the visitor.

2. Val d’Orcia shows the archetypal Tuscan landscape

The Val d’Orcia is the part of Tuscany that the rest of the world has decided represents Italy: the rolling hills, the isolated farmhouses on cypress-crowned ridgelines, the vineyards in precise geometric rows, the poppy fields in May, and the ochre and sienna palette of the earth in summer. The valley, a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, spreads across the territory south of Siena toward Monte Amiata, and its specific quality is the experience of a landscape that has been managed for beauty and agricultural productivity simultaneously over centuries, producing a countryside whose every element is both functional and visually perfect.

The hill towns that anchor the valley, Montalcino, Pienza, and Montepulciano, give the landscape its human counterparts: medieval and Renaissance towns perched on hilltops above the valley floor where the local agricultural products, Brunello di Montalcino, Pecorino di Pienza, and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, are produced at a quality that gives the food and wine program its most complete regional expression. A tasting circuit through the valley’s osterias and cantinas gives the visit an edible dimension whose quality matches the visual.

The photography from the Val d’Orcia requires early rising: the morning light between October and May produces the mist that sits in the valley hollows while the hilltops are already lit, creating the layered visual quality that makes the most celebrated Val d’Orcia photographs distinctive. The summer midday heat flattens the light and removes the atmospheric depth that gives the landscape its painterly quality, and the spring and autumn shoulder seasons give the valley its best photographic and experiential conditions. The San Quirico d’Orcia gardens, the Horti Leonini, give the........

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