The Most Beautiful Bell Towers in Italy
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful bell towers in Italy are St Mark's Campanile, Leaning Tower of Pisa and Torre del Mangia. The list covers 5 bell towers. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italian bell towers, the campanili, usually stand apart from their churches, free to rise as independent monuments, and in medieval city-states they became symbols of civic pride as much as calls to prayer. Rival towns competed to build higher and finer towers in marble, brick and stone, and many still define their skylines.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa, the bell tower of the city's cathedral on the Piazza dei Miracoli, began to tilt soon after construction started in 1173 because its foundations were laid in soft ground, and its white marble arcades have leaned ever since. The Torre del Mangia in Siena, built in the 14th century beside the Palazzo Pubblico, is a slender brick tower crowned in stone that rises above the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo. The submerged bell tower of Graun, in South Tyrol, is all that remains visible of a village flooded in 1950 to create Lake Reschen, a 14th-century tower standing alone in the water.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | St Mark's Campanile | Bell tower | |
| 2 | Leaning Tower of Pisa | Bell tower | ✓ |
| 3 | Torre del Mangia | Bell tower | |
| 4 | Giotto's Campanile | Bell tower | |
| 5 | Submerged Bell Tower of Graun (Lake Reschen) | Bell tower |
01 St Mark's Campanile
Campanile di San Marco
Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.339° E
Image by hadzaj from Pixabay The tower you see is in fact a replica. On the morning of 14 July 1902, after days of widening cracks, the whole campanile slid straight down into a heap of rubble. Because it fell vertically, the basilica was spared; the Loggetta was crushed and a corner of the Marciana Library lost, and the only fatality was the custodian's cat. That same evening the city council voted to rebuild it as it had been and where it had been, and the new tower, strengthened inside with reinforced concrete, was inaugurated on Saint Mark's Day, 25 April 1912. A lift installed in 1962 reaches the belfry in about half a minute.
02 Leaning Tower of Pisa
Torre di Pisa
Italy · 0.4 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.397° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MaxiDesigns from Pixabay By the twentieth century the lean had crept past 5 degrees and engineers judged the tower at real risk of toppling. It was closed to visitors for roughly a decade starting in 1990 while crews carefully extracted small amounts of soil from beneath the raised north side, coaxing the whole structure back by about 44 centimeters — enough, by current estimates, to buy it several more centuries, with no intention of ever making it stand perfectly straight.
Did you know? Building took 199 years in three stages: the foundations went in on 9 August 1173 and the bell chamber was finished in 1372.
03 Torre del Mangia
Italy · 1.4 km from Siena43.318° N 11.332° E
Image by roberto_bellasio from Pixabay At the tower's foot stands the Cappella di Piazza, a marble loggia raised in 1352 by citizens who had survived the Black Death, as a vow to the Virgin; its Renaissance vault was added in the 1460s by Antonio Federighi. From there some 400 steps climb inside the walls to the open belfry. The reward is a view straight down into the Campo, where the fan-shaped brick paving and the Fonte Gaia are laid out as on a plan, with the cathedral, the rooftops of the contrade and the rolling countryside beyond.
Did you know? The Mangia automaton was remade again and again: wood at first, brass from 1425, and in 1666 a hay-stuffed figure clothed by a local tailor.
04 Giotto's Campanile
Campanile di Giotto
Italy · 0.9 km from Florence43.773° N 11.256° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The tower is also the best platform from which to understand Brunelleschi's dome. A stair of 414 steps, broad and broken by landings, climbs through the storeys, with terraces to step out on along the way; from the top the red dome fills the view at almost eye level, and the whole city spreads out around it to the hills. Seven bells hang inside, the largest, the Campanone cast in 1705, weighing over five tonnes. The campanile belongs to the Historic Centre of Florence World Heritage Site.
05 Submerged Bell Tower of Graun (Lake Reschen)
Campanile di Santa Caterina
Italy46.811° N 10.537° E
Image by tassilo111 from Pixabay The tower changes character with the seasons. In summer it stands in blue-green water against the surrounding peaks; in winter the reservoir, some 6 km long at about 1,500 m above sea level, freezes over and the tower rises out of a flat white plain crossed by skaters and snowkiters. When the level is drawn down in spring, the foundations of the drowned village sometimes surface around it. The story has fed both literature and television: Marco Balzano's 2018 novel about a teacher who lived through the flooding, and the Italian Netflix series Curon (2020), which spins a supernatural tale around the tower and its lake.
Did you know? According to local legend, the drowned bells can still be heard ringing across the frozen lake in winter, even though they were removed before the flooding.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful bell towers in Italy?
- On our list, St Mark's Campanile ranks first, followed by Leaning Tower of Pisa and Torre del Mangia.
- Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?
- The tower was built on soft, unstable soil of clay and sand, and it began to sink unevenly after the first floors were completed in the 12th century. Engineering works around 2000 reduced the tilt and stabilised it.
- Why is there a bell tower in the middle of Lake Reschen?
- A dam built in 1950 raised the water level and flooded the old village of Graun. The houses were demolished, but the 14th-century bell tower of its church was left standing in the lake.
- Why is it called the Torre del Mangia?
- It takes its name from its first bell ringer, Giovanni di Balduccio, who was nicknamed Mangiaguadagni, meaning one who eats his earnings.
- How many bell towers are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 5 bell towers.