The Most Beautiful Churches in Italy
37 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful churches in Italy are Milan Cathedral, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. The list covers 37 churches. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italy holds an unbroken record of church building from late antiquity to the Baroque. Rome kept the early Christian basilicas and converted pagan temples, Ravenna preserved the mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries, Venice looked east to Byzantium, and rival city-states competed in marble during the Middle Ages. The Renaissance and the Baroque were both born here, so the same few streets can hold a mosaic apse, a Gothic facade and a painted illusionistic ceiling.
Milan Cathedral bristles with marble pinnacles and statues, while Siena Cathedral is striped in black and white marble and paved with an inlaid marble floor. St Mark's Basilica in Venice is lined with gold-ground mosaics, and in Ravenna the Baptistry of Neon still shows its fifth-century mosaic of the baptism of Christ. The Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi covers its walls with frescoes of the saint's life.
Rome gives the widest range: the Pantheon, a Roman temple consecrated as a church in 609; the early mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore; Bramante's small round Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio; Borromini's oval San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane; and Sant'Ignazio, where Andrea Pozzo painted a vault that seems to open to the sky. In Florence, the Baptistery bears Ghiberti's gilded bronze doors and Santa Croce holds the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo.
In this list
01 Milan Cathedral
Duomo di Milano
Italy · 1.3 km from Milan45.464° N 9.191° E
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside, look for the sixteenth-century statue of Saint Bartholomew by Marco d'Agrate, showing the flayed apostle wearing his own skin like a stole; the Trivulzio candelabrum in the transept, with a twelfth-century bronze base; and the tomb of Gian Giacomo Medici by Leone Leoni. A red light high in the apse marks where a nail said to be from the Crucifixion is kept, brought down once a year for the Rite of the Nivola. The most memorable experience, though, is the roof: visitors can walk among the pinnacles, flying buttresses and statues that are invisible from the ground. Mark Twain, who climbed up in 1867, devoted a chapter of The Innocents Abroad to the building.
Did you know? During the Second World War the Madonnina was wrapped in cloth so that her gleam could not serve as a landmark for Allied bombers.
02 San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane
Chiesa di San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane
Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.902° N 12.491° E
Alexkom000 · CC BY 4.0 The undulating façade, with its concave and convex bays stacked in two storeys, was the last thing Borromini worked on: it was still unfinished when he died in 1667, and the work was completed by his nephew Bernardo, continuing until 1682. Over the main door, winged herms frame a statue of St Charles Borromeo by Antonio Raggi. The church stands on one corner of the Quattro Fontane crossroads, where four fountains are set diagonally into the corners of the buildings, and a few steps away is Bernini's Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, so the two great rivals of Roman Baroque can be compared within a single short walk.
Did you know? Groups of three recur throughout the interior, from the angels in the pendentives to the rows of coffers, in tribute to the Trinity venerated by the order.
03 Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi
Basilica di San Francesco
Italy · 18 km from Perugia43.075° N 12.606° E
Hagai Agmon-Snir حچاي اچمون-سنير חגי אגמון-שניר · CC BY-SA 4.0 On 26 September 1997 two earthquakes struck Umbria; an aftershock brought down part of the Upper Church vault, killing four people and shattering the painted plaster. The restoration took two years. The basilica is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Assisi, inscribed in 2000.
Did you know? Cimabue's Madonna Enthroned with Saint Francis in the Lower Church, of around 1280, is thought to be the closest surviving likeness of the saint.
04 Siena Cathedral
Duomo di Siena
Italy · 1.7 km from Siena43.318° N 11.329° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Anajim from Pixabay The third highlight is the Piccolomini Library, commissioned in 1492 by Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, later Pope Pius III, to hold the books of his uncle Pope Pius II; much of the collection is lost, but it still keeps richly illuminated psalters of the 1460s and 1470s. Duccio's Maestà, once the high altarpiece, is now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo next door, and the round window he designed for the choir, one of the earliest surviving works of Italian stained glass, has been replaced in the church by a replica. Bernini added the gilded lantern on the dome. The cathedral is the centre of the Historic Centre of Siena UNESCO site.
Did you know? The young Michelangelo carved four saints for the Piccolomini altar between 1501 and 1504, including Peter, Paul and Pius.
05 Baptistry of Neon
Battistero Neoniano
Italy · 1.9 km from Ravenna44.416° N 12.197° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Clodette662000 · CC BY-SA 4.0 It is best seen together with the other monuments, San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia among them.
Did you know? A restoration of 1897 to 1906 stripped off stucco decoration thought to be later additions; it proved to be fifth-century, and only reconstructions remain.
06 Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel
Santuario di San Michele Arcangelo
Italy41.708° N 15.955° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 The town around the sanctuary is worth time too: the castle with its pentagonal Giants' Tower, and the so-called Tomb of Rothari, in fact a 12th-century baptistery. The sanctuary is a minor basilica and an active place of worship.
07 St Mark's Basilica
Basilica di San Marco
Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay Inside, the domes, vaults and upper walls are covered with gold-ground mosaics made over about eight centuries, some purely Byzantine, others designed from drawings by Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Uccello and other Renaissance painters. In the dim light the gold seems to glow on its own. Behind the high altar, where St Mark's relics have rested since 1835, is the Pala d'Oro, a golden altarpiece ordered from Constantinople in 1102 and installed in 1105. Around the chancel, bronze reliefs tell the life and miracles of St Mark, and the ciborium over the altar rests on four carved columns whose age is still debated, with dates proposed from 6th-century Byzantium to 13th-century Venice.
Did you know? The famous horses are not true bronze but at least 96.67 percent copper, and their date is disputed, from Classical Greece to the 2nd or 3rd century AD.
08 Sant'Ignazio Church
Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Campo Marzio
Italy · 0.2 km from Rome41.899° N 12.480° E
Fiat 500e · CC BY 4.0 Pozzo, a Jesuit lay brother, painted the nave vault around 1685, presenting the work of the order spreading to the four continents. The money for a real dome had run out, so in 1685 he supplied a painted one on a large canvas over the crossing; it was later destroyed by fire and faithfully reproduced in 1823 by Francesco Manno from Pozzo's own drawings. Pozzo also painted the apse with scenes from the saint's life. The rest of the interior is rich with coloured marble, gilding and stucco: Pierre Le Gros carved the marble relief of St Aloysius Gonzaga in glory and the monument to Gregory XV and Cardinal Ludovisi, and Aloysius Gonzaga, Robert Bellarmine and John Berchmans are buried here.
Did you know? Ludovisi first chose a site near the Jesuit novitiate on the Quirinal, but the pope objected that a tall church there would block the view.
09 Modena Cathedral
Duomo di Modena
Italy · 0.6 km from Modena44.646° N 10.925° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Ermaf62 from Pixabay Inside, the crypt still displays the saint's remains. The marble parapet between the nave and the crypt, carved by Anselmo da Campione with the Passion and the Last Supper, and a pulpit by Arrigo da Campione are the highlights, together with two famous terracotta nativity groups: Guido Mazzoni's of 1480 in the crypt and Antonio Begarelli's of 1527. The funeral of Modena's most famous son, the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, was held here.
10 Florence Baptistery
Battistero di San Giovanni
Italy · 0.9 km from Florence43.773° N 11.255° E
Zairon · CC BY 4.0 Inside, the building transforms. The dome is covered in a golden Italo-Byzantine mosaic of the thirteenth century, made of some ten million tesserae, dominated by a six-metre-high Christ in Judgment, with fifteen scenes of the Baptist's life among the tiers circling above. Beneath it lies the tomb of the Antipope John XXIII by Donatello and Michelozzo, the first Renaissance funerary monument.
Did you know? The green-and-white zebra-striped corner pilasters are a later addition, applied in 1293 when work on the new cathedral began.
11 Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca
Santuario della Madonna di San Luca
Italy · 4.1 km from Bologna44.479° N 11.298° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by alex1965 from Pixabay The road up the hill is a known climb in professional cycling. It hosts the finish circuit of the Giro dell'Emilia, featured in the Giro d'Italia as early as 1956 and appeared in the 2024 Tour de France. From 1931 to 1976 a cable car ran up the hill, and its abandoned top station still stands. Walking the portico, especially the steep final stretch, is the traditional way to arrive.
12 Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.898° N 12.499° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
L'Ospite Inatteso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Outside, the medieval façade mosaics are screened by a loggia designed by Ferdinando Fuga and completed in 1743, and the 14th-century bell tower, about 75 m high, is the tallest in Rome. The Marian column in the square in front was put up in 1614 to designs by Carlo Maderno. Pope Francis was buried here in 2025, in the side aisle between the Sforza and Pauline chapels.
Did you know? The column in the piazza is the only intact column surviving from the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine in the Roman Forum.
13 Tempietto
Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio
Italy · 1.6 km from Rome41.889° N 12.466° E
Sailko · CC BY-SA 3.0 San Pietro in Montorio sits on the slope of the Janiculum, the ridge on the west bank of the Tiber above the old quarter of Trastevere. Rome, the Italian capital, gathers nearly three thousand years of building within its walls; the Tempietto is one of its smallest and most perfect monuments.
Did you know? Its sixteen columns are of grey granite, while the rest of the stonework is travertine; Vitruvius had praised sixteen as a perfect number.
14 Basilica di Santa Croce
Italy · 2.1 km from Lecce40.355° N 18.173° E
Image by guy_dugas from Pixabay Inside, the Latin-cross church has a nave and four aisles, two of which were converted into chapels in the 18th century, a coffered wooden ceiling and seventeen altars; the most elaborate, dedicated to Saint Francis of Paola, is the work of Francesco Antonio Zimbalo. Lecce itself, in the heel of Apulia, is known for this ornate local style, made possible by the fine, easily worked stone quarried around the city.
Did you know? In the 19th century critics mocked the facade as ridiculous and tasteless; only in the 20th century did scholars begin decoding its symbolism.
15 Pantheon, Rome
Pantheon
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.899° N 12.477° E
Image by falcon505 from Pixabay The building survived because it never stopped being used. In 609 the emperor Phocas gave it to Pope Boniface IV, who consecrated it as the church of Saint Mary and the Martyrs, and it is still a church. Among the tombs in its chapels are those of the painter Raphael and the first two kings of united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II and Umberto I. Outside, Piazza della Rotonda has a fountain topped by an Egyptian obelisk.
Did you know? In 663 the Byzantine emperor Constans II stripped the gilded bronze roof tiles and shipped them toward Constantinople.
16 Baptistery of Parma
Battistero di Parma
Italy · 1.2 km from Parma44.803° N 10.330° E
Image by valtercirillo from Pixabay The dome paintings, executed in tempera in the thirteenth century, begin with a red sky of divine love at the summit and a blue starry heaven, then descend through the apostles and evangelists, Christ enthroned between the Virgin and John the Baptist with the prophets, and twelve scenes from the Baptist's life, down to the stories of Abraham, the seasons and the elements in the arches. The niches below received votive frescoes from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, including a Saint George slaying the dragon attributed to Buffalmacco. At the centre stands a large octagonal basin of Verona marble made for baptism by immersion.
Did you know? The dome is about 23.25 metres across and was painted in fast-drying tempera rather than true fresco, which is why the paint began flaking early.
17 Pisa Cathedral
Duomo di Pisa
Italy · 0.5 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.396° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Three works justify a long look. The pulpit by Giovanni Pisano, carved between 1302 and 1310, is one of the masterpieces of Italian Gothic sculpture: curved panels crowded with figures, held up by statues of the Virtues instead of plain columns. It was dismantled after the fire and only reassembled in 1926, not quite in its original arrangement. In the apse, the great mosaic of Christ enthroned includes the head of St John by Cimabue, dated 1302 — his last documented work.
18 Archbasilica of St. John Lateran
Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano
Italy · 2.5 km from Rome41.886° N 12.506° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
NikonZ7II · CC BY-SA 4.0 Older layers survive beneath the Baroque. The floor is medieval Cosmatesque inlay, the Gothic ciborium over the high altar dates from 1369, and the 13th-century cloister, surrounded by columns of inlaid marble, is the work of the Vassalletto family and the Cosmati. A 4th-century statue of Constantine stands in the portico. Outside, on the square, rises the Lateran Obelisk, commissioned by the pharaoh Thutmose III for Karnak and the largest standing ancient Egyptian obelisk in the world. The basilica and its properties are part of the Historic Centre of Rome World Heritage Site.
Did you know? Popes lived in the neighbouring Lateran Palace for roughly a thousand years, until the papacy moved to Avignon in 1309, and five ecumenical councils met there.
19 Basilica of Saint Paul outside the Walls
Basilica di San Paolo fuori le mura
Italy · 4.4 km from Rome41.859° N 12.477° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by loveombra from Pixabay The basilica is one of Rome's four major papal basilicas and a Benedictine abbey church. It stands on Italian soil but belongs to the Holy See. Its Holy Door is opened only in jubilee years, and in October 2025 King Charles III attended an ecumenical service here and was made a confrater of the abbey.
20 Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza
Chiesa di Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza
Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.898° N 12.475° E
Image by ivosilvestro from Pixabay The church is dedicated to Saint Ivo, patron saint of lawyers, and its decoration records the popes who paid for it: the bees of the Barberini family of Urban VIII appear on the lantern, while the mountains and star of the Chigi family appear inside. The church was consecrated in 1660. The main altar, designed by Giovanni Battista Contini, dates from 1684, and its altarpiece was begun by Pietro da Cortona and completed after his death by Giovanni Ventura Borghesi. The Palazzo della Sapienza, which once housed the university, is now home to the State Archives of Rome.
Did you know? The dome is a deliberate illusion: its six-lobed interior shape is hidden outside by a curving drum and stepped roof rising to the lantern.
21 Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna
Basilica di San Vitale
Italy · 1.9 km from Ravenna44.421° N 12.196° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Terragio67 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ravenna was the capital of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, then the seat of the Ostrogothic kings, and later the centre of Byzantine rule in Italy. Each period left buildings decorated with mosaics. San Vitale is one of eight early Christian monuments in the city that UNESCO inscribed together as a World Heritage Site in 1996. It is also the only major church from Justinian's reign to survive almost unchanged.
Did you know? Justinian's panel is traditionally read as including his generals Belisarius and Narses among the courtiers, soldiers and clergy.
22 Florence Cathedral
Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore
Italy · 1 km from Florence43.773° N 11.257° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by spalla67 from Pixabay Below the nave, excavations between 1965 and 1974 uncovered Roman houses and the remains of Santa Reparata, the older cathedral this one replaced; part of that crypt is open, and near its entrance lies Brunelleschi's own plain tomb. The cathedral forms a single ensemble with Giotto's Campanile and the Baptistery on Piazza del Duomo, inside the UNESCO-listed historic centre of Florence.
Did you know? Michelangelo's David was originally meant for one of the cathedral's buttresses, but the six-ton statue proved far too heavy to be raised there.
23 Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.437° N 12.326° E
Falk2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Venice, built on more than a hundred islands in its lagoon, needs little introduction: a maritime republic for over a thousand years, it filled its churches with the work of the greatest Venetian painters, and the Frari is among the finest of them.
Did you know? Titian was buried in the church in 1576, during the plague that struck Venice that year.
24 Cappella Sansevero
Italy · 1.3 km from Naples40.849° N 14.255° E
David Sivyer · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the crypt below are two of the chapel's strangest exhibits, the so-called anatomical machines commissioned by Raimondo di Sangro around 1760: the skeletons of a man and a woman with their arteries and veins reconstructed in beeswax, iron wire and silk. The chapel stands in the heart of old Naples, the city founded by Greek colonists that grew into one of the great capitals of baroque Europe, and its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Did you know? According to legend, part of the garden wall collapsed before a wrongly arrested man, revealing a painting of the Pietà, and he was soon proved innocent.
25 Scrovegni Chapel
Cappella degli Scrovegni
Italy · 34.3 km from Venice45.412° N 11.880° E
Andrea Piroddi · CC BY-SA 3.0 Giotto and a large workshop arranged the frescoes in tiers: the lives of Joachim and Anne, then the life of the Virgin, then the life, Passion and Resurrection of Christ. The entrance wall holds a vast Last Judgement, and along the lowest band fourteen grey monochrome figures personify the virtues and vices. On the vault, roundels with prophets and with Christ and the Virgin stand out against the starry blue. Since 2021 the chapel has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Padua's 14th-century fresco cycles, and it belongs today to the city's civic museums together with the neighbouring former Augustinian monastery of the Eremitani.
Did you know? In January 1305 the friars of the nearby Eremitani church complained that the chapel was growing into a rival church with a bell tower.
26 Santa Maria della Salute
Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute
Italy · 0.9 km from Venice45.431° N 12.335° E
Image by EdiHoch from Pixabay The vow is still honoured. Every year on 21 November, for the Festa della Salute, a temporary pontoon bridge is laid across the Grand Canal and Venetians walk over it to light candles in the church. It is also the building painters kept returning to - Canaletto, Turner and Monet all set it at the centre of their views of the canal.
Did you know? Tradition holds that around a million wooden piles were driven into the lagoon mud to support the church.
27 Church of St. Peter
Chiesa di San Pietro
Italy44.048° N 9.832° E
Image by Zotx from Pixabay Porto Venere itself is a fishing town of tall, narrow, colour-washed houses lined up along the harbour, with the islands of Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto just offshore. Together with the Cinque Terre and those islands it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. Below the church, a now-collapsed sea cave on the cliffs bears Lord Byron's name; in 1822 the poet swam across the gulf from here to visit Shelley at Lerici.
Did you know? In 1494 the church was hit both by a fire that swept the town and by Aragonese artillery during the Battle of Porto Venere.
28 Oratorio di Santa Maria in Valle
Tempietto longobardo
Italy · 15.2 km from Udine46.094° N 13.433° E
Welleschik · CC BY-SA 3.0 The interior is a single square hall under a broad cross vault, closed by a lower presbytery divided by paired columns into three bays with parallel barrel vaults. On the west wall, once the entrance, the doorway lunette shows Christ between the archangels Michael and Gabriel, framed by vines with bunches of grapes, with a painted band of martyrs alongside and an openwork frieze of tendrils above, whose rosettes once held glass beads. The six female saints above draw on classical and Byzantine models, but their pronounced verticality and sense of volume are their own.
Did you know? A painted dedication of twenty-four Latin hexameters in white and ochre letters on a purple ground invoked the Virgin and the Redeemer without naming the royal patrons.
29 Sacro Monte di Varallo
Sacro monte di Varallo
Italy45.819° N 8.255° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0 After Caimi's death the decisive figure was the painter, sculptor and architect Gaudenzio Ferrari, a native of Valduggia, who worked here into the late 1520s and created some of the most powerful scenes, among them the Magi in Bethlehem and the Crucifixion, combining crowded sculpted figures with frescoes that continue the action on the walls. From 1565 the architect Galeazzo Alessi redesigned the layout so that pilgrims would follow the chapels in chronological order, through a lower garden zone of scattered pavilions up to a summit laid out as a city, with porticoed palaces around the Piazza dei Tribunali and the Piazza del Tempio, entered through the Golden Gate.
Did you know? The Holy Stairs inside the Palace of Pilate are modelled on the Scala Santa at the Lateran in Rome.
30 St. John’s Chapel, Ranui
Chiesa di San Giovanni in Ranui
Italy · 31.7 km from Bolzano46.635° N 11.724° E
User:Matthias Süßen · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside, the barrel vault and walls carry nine paintings of scenes from the saint's life, probably by Nikolaus Weis. The jewel of the interior is the main altar of marbled wood, with an altarpiece by Franz Sebald Unterberger of the Fiemme valley showing the Virgin enthroned with the Christ Child and St. John of Nepomuk. The chapel has been painted in watercolour by the bishop Reinhold Stecher and appeared on an Austrian Christmas stamp in 2009. It stands on private farmland, and the surrounding meadows are fenced, so the view is best enjoyed from the path.
Did you know? Its east end closes in a three-sided apse, and a fresco of St. John of Nepomuk greets visitors above the entrance.
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 churches in Italy?
- On our list, Milan Cathedral ranks first, followed by San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi.
- Why is the Pantheon in Rome a church?
- In 609 the Byzantine emperor gave the building to Pope Boniface IV, who consecrated it as the church of Santa Maria ad Martyres. Continuous use as a church is the main reason it survived almost intact.
- Who is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence?
- Santa Croce holds the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and Rossini, among others, and a monument to Dante, who is buried in Ravenna.
- What is the fake dome in Sant'Ignazio?
- The church's real dome was never built, so in 1685 Andrea Pozzo painted a flat canvas in perspective that appears, from the right spot in the nave, to be a full dome.
- How many churches are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 37 churches.