ItaliaDream.TV
The Best of Italy
No other country in the world has more World Heritage sites. But UNESCO also protects what cannot be visited: a song, a craft, a feast. Two chapters, in order of inscription: the 62 places, from Valcamonica to the historic theatres of central Italy, and the 20 elements of intangible heritage, from the canto a tenore to Italian cooking.
The places: from the rock drawings of Valcamonica to the historic theatres of central Italy, in the order they entered the World Heritage List.
More than 300,000 rock carvings cut into the stone of Valcamonica, created over a span of eight thousand years. It was the first Italian site to be inscribed on the UNESCO list, in 1979.
Photo Bramfab · CC BY-SA 4.0
The heart of the Eternal City, from the Colosseum to the Pantheon, together with the papal basilicas: over two thousand years of Western history in a single historic centre. The site was extended in 1990.
This Dominican complex in Milan houses Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, an absolute masterpiece of the Renaissance painted between 1495 and 1498.
Cradle of the Renaissance: Brunelleschi's Duomo, the Uffizi, Palazzo Vecchio. An open-air museum that for two centuries was the centre of Western art.
A city built entirely on water, a unique urban and artistic masterpiece, today working to protect itself from the rising waters of the very lagoon that made it famous.
The Piazza dei Miracoli, with the Leaning Tower, the Cathedral and the Baptistery: a masterpiece of Pisan Romanesque art built between the 11th and 14th centuries.
The famous medieval Tuscan towers, once around 72 in number, which earned the town the nickname “Medieval Manhattan”: today only 14 remain.
Photo Eric Kilby · CC BY-SA 2.0
An ancient settlement carved into limestone rock, continuously inhabited for millennia: it was European Capital of Culture in 2019.
The architectural legacy of Andrea Palladio: 23 buildings across the city and the Veneto countryside that have influenced Western architecture for centuries.
A masterpiece of medieval town planning built around Piazza del Campo, the setting each year for the Palio, the horse race between the city's contrade.
One of the largest and most layered historic centres in Europe: over 2,500 years of continuous history, from the Greeks to the Bourbons, within a single urban fabric.
A 19th-century workers' village built by the industrialist Cristoforo Crespi as an ideal model of a company town: school, hospital, theatre, and housing for the workers.
Photo Fabio Pani · CC BY-SA 4.0
A Renaissance city planned by the Este family, home to the famous Herculean Addition, together with the river landscape of the Po Delta.
An octagonal fortress commissioned by Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century, an enigmatic geometric masterpiece of medieval architecture.
The distinctive dry-stone dwellings with conical roofs, unique in the world, built without mortar using a technique handed down over centuries.
Byzantine mosaics among the most extraordinary ever created, housed in eight religious and civil buildings from the 5th and 6th centuries, when the city was capital of the Western Roman Empire.
The “ideal city” of the Renaissance, commissioned by Pope Pius II to transform his native village according to the principles of humanist town planning.
Roman cities buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and frozen in time, today among the most visited archaeological sites in the world.
The Bourbon royal palace designed by Luigi Vanvitelli, one of the largest royal residences in Europe, with a park covering more than 120 hectares.
Photo Carlo Pelagalli · CC BY-SA 3.0
A Mediterranean coastal landscape of extraordinary beauty, with terraces, lemon groves and villages such as Positano and Ravello perched above the sea.
A Romanesque masterpiece by the architect Lanfranco and the sculptor Wiligelmo, an example of the perfect integration of cathedral, tower and medieval square.
A Ligurian coastal landscape of cultivated terraces and colourful villages clinging to the rock, among the most photographed stretches of coastline in Italy.
The network of royal residences built by the House of Savoy around Turin, including the Reggia di Venaria and Palazzo Reale, symbols of the dynasty's power.
The most important nuraghe complex in Sardinia, evidence of the Bronze Age Nuragic civilisation, with its distinctive central stone tower.
Photo Norbert Nagel · CC BY-SA 3.0
The Valley of the Temples, the largest and best-preserved complex of Doric temples outside Greece, set within a landscape of olive and almond trees.
A 4th-century Roman villa with the most extensive and best-preserved floor mosaics in the world, including the famous scene of the “bikini girls.”
The oldest university botanical garden in the world still in its original location, founded in 1545 for the study of medicinal plants.
An ancient Roman colony and important early Christian centre, whose basilica houses the largest early Christian mosaic floor in the Western world.
Photo Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0
The birthplace of Raphael, a Renaissance urban jewel commissioned by Duke Federico da Montefeltro around his celebrated Palazzo Ducale.
The Greek temples of Paestum, among the best preserved in the world, the Hellenistic site of Velia, and one of the largest Carthusian monasteries in Europe.
An extraordinary complex of classical buildings commissioned by Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century as an ideal synthesis of the architecture of the known world at the time.
A volcanic archipelago off Sicily, a natural laboratory for volcanology since the 18th century, home to Stromboli, one of the most active volcanoes in the world.
The birthplace of the Franciscan movement, home to Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Basilica, among the most influential fresco cycles in the history of art.
A city of art with a Roman amphitheatre still used for performances, medieval bridges over the Adige, and the Shakespearean setting of Romeo and Juliet.
A masterpiece of the 16th-century Italian Mannerist garden, famous for its system of more than 500 fountains and water features fed without mechanical pumps.
Eight towns in south-eastern Sicily, including Noto and Ragusa, rebuilt in a unified Baroque style after the devastating earthquake of 1693.
Nine devotional complexes built between the 16th and 17th centuries on pre-Alpine hills, with chapels that narrate sacred episodes through statues and frescoes.
Photo Carlo Dell'Orto · CC BY-SA 4.0
The most important surviving evidence of Etruscan civilisation, with rock-cut, painted tombs that reproduce the architecture of the houses of the living.
Photo Sailko · CC BY 3.0
A Tuscan agrarian landscape celebrated in Renaissance painting, with solitary cypresses, gentle hills and towns such as Pienza and Montalcino.
The Greek city founded by Corinth in the 8th century BC, together with the ancient Sicel centre of Pantalica, carved into the rock with more than 5,000 tombs.
A system of 16th- and 17th-century noble palaces built to host, on a rotating basis, the distinguished visitors of the Republic of Genoa.
Two cities symbolic of the Italian Renaissance and linked to the Gonzaga family: Mantua, a ducal capital, and Sabbioneta, an “ideal city” built from scratch.
An Alpine engineering masterpiece from the early 20th century, a transnational site shared with Switzerland, famous for the spiral viaducts of the Bernina Express.
A mountain landscape of unique forms, nine mountain groups among the most spectacular ranges in the world, celebrated by Le Corbusier as “the most beautiful work of architecture in the world.”
A mountain on the border with Switzerland, home to one of the most important Triassic marine fossil deposits in the world, with remains of marine reptiles 240 million years old.
Photo F Ceragioli · CC BY-SA 3.0
Seven sites, from Friuli to Apulia, that bear witness to the peak of Lombard civilisation in Italy between the 6th and 8th centuries.
Photo Aconcagua · CC BY-SA 3.0
Neolithic and Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlements around the Alpine lakes, a transnational site shared with five other European countries.
Photo Robertk9410 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Twelve villas and two gardens that bear witness to the Medici family's influence on Renaissance culture, a model of aristocratic residence in harmony with nature.
Photo Mongolo1984 · CC BY-SA 3.0
The highest active volcano in Europe, at over 3,300 metres, and one of the most studied in the world for its nearly continuous eruptive activity over the past 500,000 years.
The wine-growing landscape symbolic of Barolo and Barbaresco, a mosaic of vine-covered hills shaped by centuries of farming tradition.
A unique synthesis of Arab, Norman and Byzantine art in Sicily, culminating in the golden mosaics of Monreale Cathedral.
A system of fortifications of the Republic of Venice, a transnational site that includes the star-shaped town of Palmanova and the walls of Bergamo Alta.
Primeval beech forests untouched by human activity, evidence of European ecosystems before the spread of agriculture: a transnational site extending across 18 countries, with thirteen beech forests in Italy.
Photo Nella Laquintana · CC BY-SA 4.0
The “Olivetti town”: an entire industrial and residential district designed according to a unique 20th-century model of corporate welfare.
Photo Plumbago Capensis · CC BY-SA 4.0
A hilly landscape in the Veneto devoted to the cultivation of Prosecco Superiore, grown on extremely steep slopes still worked by hand.
Eight buildings with 14th-century fresco cycles, including the Scrovegni Chapel with Giotto's masterpiece on the life of Christ and the Virgin.
Photo Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0
The historic European spa towns that developed between the 18th and 20th centuries, represented for Italy by Montecatini Terme: a transnational site extending across 7 countries.
Photo Michela.osteri · CC BY-SA 4.0
More than 60 km of historic porticoes, some dating back to the 12th century, that define Bologna's urban identity and make it the city with the most porticoes in the world.
A karst system carved into gypsum rock, among the most extensive and most studied evaporite karst phenomena in the world: over 900 caves across seven areas of Emilia-Romagna.
Photo Dadonene89 · CC BY-SA 4.0
The oldest and most important of the great Roman roads: over 800 km from Rome to Brindisi, begun in 312 BC on the initiative of Appius Claudius Caecus.
Copper and Bronze Age rock-cut tombs in Sardinia, literally “fairy houses” in Sardinian popular tradition.
Photo Ángel M. Felicísimo · CC BY 2.0
Ten historic 18th- and 19th-century theatres across the Marche, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna, from the Pergolesi in Jesi to the Ventidio Basso in Ascoli: a unique model of theatre as property shared between public bodies and citizens, inscribed in July 2026.
Photo Parsifall · CC BY-SA 4.0
Not places but living practices: songs, crafts, feasts and knowledge handed down by communities. The twenty Italian elements of the Representative List, in the order Italy entered them; the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices also lists, since 2022, Tocatì, the Verona programme of traditional games.
Four male voices in a circle — boche, mesu boche, contra and bassu — with two guttural voices imitating the wind and the livestock: the polyphony of the Barbagia, born among shepherds. Proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral Heritage in 2005, it entered the Representative List in 2008.
Photo Sardegnabella · CC BY-SA 3.0
The armoured marionettes of Palermo and Catania, two schools differing in size and mechanics, stage the deeds of the paladins of France: Orlando, Rinaldo, Angelica. A nineteenth-century popular theatre handed down from father to son in the puppeteers' families, the first Italian element recognised.
Not a table of foods but a way of living: bread, oil, wine, the shared table, the knowledge of those who grow and cook. Inscribed in 2010 with Spain, Greece and Morocco, extended in 2013 to Cyprus, Croatia and Portugal; Italy's emblematic community is Pollica, in the Cilento, where Ancel Keys studied it.
Violins, violas and cellos built by hand, piece by piece, without industrial materials, as in the workshops of Amati, Stradivari and Guarneri. More than a hundred luthiers still work in Cremona, and each instrument requires over seventy wooden parts assembled according to tradition.
Four processions in which an entire town carries towering structures on its shoulders: the Gigli of Nola for Saint Paulinus, the thirty-metre Macchina di Santa Rosa in Viterbo, the Varia of Palmi and the Faradda of the Candelieri in Sassari on 14 August. Bearers, music and rites handed down for centuries.
Photo Gianni Careddu · CC BY-SA 3.0
On the island of the wind the vine is grown low, in a hollow dug into the volcanic soil that shelters it and gathers moisture: from these plants comes the zibibbo of the passito wine. It was the first agricultural practice in the world to enter the List.
The art of training and flying birds of prey, which Frederick II described in the thirteenth century in «De arte venandi cum avibus». Italy joined the multinational element in 2016; extended in 2021 to twenty-four countries, it is the most widely shared on the whole List.
Dough, leavening, the hand «ammaccatura» that pushes the air towards the rim, the wood-fired oven at nearly five hundred degrees for a few seconds. A craft learned in Naples in the workshop and accompanied by stories and songs: inscribed in December 2017.
Walls, terraces and shelters built by fitting stones together without mortar: the trulli and low walls of the Murgia, the terraces of the Cinque Terre, the gardens of Pantelleria. Inscribed in 2018 with seven other Mediterranean and Alpine countries, extended in 2024 to five more.
Climbing a mountain under one's own power, roped together, knowing rock, ice and weather: a culture born on Mont Blanc at the end of the eighteenth century and kept by the mountain guides, like those of Courmayeur. Inscribed in 2019 with France and Switzerland.
On 29 September 1294 Celestine V granted by papal bull an indulgence to whoever entered the basilica of Collemaggio: ever since, on 28 and 29 August, L'Aquila opens the Holy Door after the procession of the Bull and the Fire of the Morrone — the first jubilee in history, repeated every year.
Photo Giulio mastrogiuseppe · CC BY-SA 4.0
Twice a year the flocks change pasture along the tratturi, the grassy tracks joining the Apennines to the Tavoliere, or over the Alpine passes of the Val Senales. Inscribed in 2019 with Austria and Greece, extended in 2023 to seven more countries: a knowledge of shepherds, dogs and seasons.
A horn without keys, played in ensemble with a breathing and singing technique born in the court hunts of the eighteenth century. In Italy the tradition lives in the Savoy residences of Stupinigi and Venaria Reale; inscribed in 2020 with France, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Lampwork beads, shaped one by one over the flame, and cane beads, cut from long glass rods and strung by the impiraresse: a Venetian craft of medieval origin that travelled with merchants across the world. Inscribed in 2020 together with France.
The truffle hunter and his dog, the small spade, the hole closed again so the wood keeps giving: an oral knowledge of soil, trees and seasons, from Alba to Acqualagna, from San Miniato to Norcia. Inscribed in 2021, it concerns the gesture, not the product.
Photo Sahgdg · CC BY-SA 4.0
The breed founded in 1580 at Lipica for the Habsburgs, the foals born dark that turn white with the years, the pedigrees recorded for generations. In Italy the state stud has been at Monterotondo since 1955; inscribed in 2022 with seven other countries heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Waale, the channels carrying stream water to the meadows of the Malles plain: wooden sluice gates, turns shared among families, meadows flooded by the book as they have been for centuries. Inscribed in 2023 with Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
A voice that fills a theatre without amplification, with breath, projection and diction taught from master to pupil since the first melodrama four centuries ago. From the conservatories to the provincial choirs, a way of singing the world names with Italian words.
Ringing bells by hand, with ropes and keyboards, following systems that differ from town to town — the Veronese, the Bolognese, the Ambrosian — to announce feasts, mourning and hours to the community. Recognised for Spain in 2022, the inscription was extended to Italy in December 2024.
Not a recipe book but a practice: the season that decides the dish, the raw material never wasted, the table as the place of family and feast, a hundred regional cuisines in one. Inscribed in New Delhi on 10 December 2025, it is the first national cuisine recognised as a whole.
Photographs from Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons, published under free licences; for every Creative Commons photograph the author is credited beneath its entry.