The Most Beautiful Film Locations in Italy
22 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in Italy are Colosseum, La Scala and Lake Garda. The list covers 22 film locations. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italy is a country where the scenery is already history. Ancient ruins sit inside living cities, Baroque squares and fountains are lit like stage sets, and active volcanoes rise from the sea within sight of the coast. Italian neorealism took cameras out of the studio and into these streets and islands, and Hollywood followed, drawn to Rome's light and the idea of Italy as a place where life is lived in public.
Rome dominates. Roman Holiday made the Spanish Steps and the Colosseum romantic landmarks, Federico Fellini sent Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita, and The Way of the Dragon set the duel between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in the Colosseum. The Baths of Caracalla have hosted opera under the open sky, and Borromini's tiny San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane shows how much drama a curved wall can hold.
The volcanoes are film stars in their own right. Roberto Rossellini named a film after Stromboli and shot it on the island with Ingrid Bergman, and footage of an eruption of Mount Etna was used for the lava planet Mustafar in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Pink Floyd filmed a concert without an audience in the amphitheatre of Pompeii. In the north, the white Miramare Castle stands on the sea near Trieste, Milan's Centrale station is a monument of stone and steel, and La Scala and the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples are the two great houses of Italian opera.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Colosseum | Archaeological site | |
| 2 | La Scala | Opera house | |
| 3 | Lake Garda | Lake | |
| 4 | Capri | Island | |
| 5 | San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane | Church building | |
| 6 | Teatro di San Carlo | Opera house | |
| 7 | Pompeii | Archaeological site | |
| 8 | Mount Etna | Volcano | |
| 9 | Lake Como | Lake | |
| 10 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | |
| 11 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | |
| 12 | Miramare Castle | Castle | |
| 13 | Baths of Caracalla | Thermae | |
| 14 | Stromboli | Volcano | ✓ |
| 15 | Milano Centrale | Railway station | |
| 16 | Certosa di Pavia | Carthusian monastery | |
| 17 | St Mark's Basilica | Cathedral | |
| 18 | Bridge of Sighs | Covered bridge | |
| 19 | Neptune's Grotto | Show cave | |
| 20 | Royal Palace of Caserta | Palace | ✓ |
| 21 | Castellana Caves | Show cave | |
| 22 | Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza | Theatre building |
01 Colosseum
Colosseo
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.492° E
Image by MARTINOPHUC from Pixabay The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived.
Did you know? Since 2000, Rome has lit the Colosseum in gold whenever a death sentence anywhere in the world is commuted.
02 La Scala
Teatro alla Scala
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.468° N 9.189° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay La Scala in Milan is, for many, simply the opera house — the place where a singer's career is made or broken. It opened on 3 August 1778 with Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta, built after fire destroyed the old ducal theatre, and it takes its name from the church of Santa Maria della Scala that was demolished to make room for it.
Did you know? In its early decades the theatre also served as a casino, with gambling going on in the foyer while operas played in the hall.
03 Lake Garda
Lago di Garda
Italy · 33.1 km from Verona45.633° N 10.667° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy and the most varied of the great Alpine lakes. Its shape explains its character: in the north it is a narrow fjord of deep water squeezed between steep mountains, while in the south it opens into a broad basin fringed by gentle morainic hills, vineyards and olive groves.
04 Capri
Isola di Capri
Italy · 32.4 km from Naples40.550° N 14.233° E
Image by babusz from Pixabay Capri is a limestone island of just over 10 square kilometres at the southern entrance to the Gulf of Naples, about 5 km off the tip of the Sorrento Peninsula. It rises in cliffs straight from the sea and is split into two communities: Capri town in the east, around its famous little square, and Anacapri higher up in the west, below Monte Solaro, at 589 m the island's highest point, which you can reach by chairlift.
05 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 San Carlo is so small that it would get lost in most Roman churches: the whole building measures only about 20 by 12 metres. Yet into that cramped corner plot Francesco Borromini fitted one of the most inventive spaces of the Baroque, and it was his first independent commission.
Did you know? Romans call it San Carlino, and its whole floor area is often said to fit inside one of the four piers that carry the dome of St Peter's.
06 Teatro di San Carlo
Italy · 0.8 km from Naples40.837° N 14.250° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Naples' royal opera house opened on 4 November 1737, the name day of its patron, the Bourbon king Charles, with Domenico Sarro's Achille in Sciro. Designed by the Sicilian architect Giovanni Antonio Medrano and fitted out by Angelo Carasale, it replaced an older theatre that no longer suited a capital with ambitions, and it was built directly against the Royal Palace.
Did you know? With no curtains on any of its 184 boxes, the original hall ensured that no member of the audience could escape the king's gaze.
07 Pompeii
Pompei
Italy · 23.2 km from Naples40.751° N 14.490° E
Glen Scarborough from The Central Coast, Australia · CC BY 2.0 Pompeii is the most complete picture we have of an ordinary Roman town, and it owes that to the catastrophe that ended it. In AD 79 Vesuvius, about 8 km away, erupted for two days. First came some eighteen hours of falling pumice, which let many of the inhabitants flee; then surges of superheated gas and ash swept through the streets and killed those who had stayed.
Did you know? Pink Floyd filmed a concert in the empty amphitheatre in 1971, playing to no audience but the film crew.
08 Mount Etna
Etna
Italy · 28.9 km from Catania37.751° N 14.993° E
Image by 19306 from Pixabay Mount Etna rises on the east coast of Sicily between Catania and Messina, a volcano so large that its base measures about 140 km around and covers some 1,190 square kilometres. It is the highest mountain in Italy south of the Alps, but its height is never fixed: in 2021 the Southeast Crater reached 3,357 metres, and after the eruptions of 2024 the Voragine crater took over as the summit at around 3,403 metres.
Did you know? The whole volcano is creeping towards the Mediterranean at an average of about 14 millimetres a year.
09 Lake Como
Lago di Como
Italy · 25.6 km from Como46.000° N 9.267° E
Image by GPoulsen from Pixabay Lake Como, or Lario, is shaped like an upside-down Y: a long northern arm splits at the promontory of Bellagio into two southern branches, one ending at the city of Como, the other at Lecco. Mountains rise almost straight out of the water on every side, and the lake is correspondingly deep, reaching about 425 m, with its floor more than 200 m below sea level.
10 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay What feeds this fountain isn't ornamental plumbing — it's the working outflow of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct finished in 19 BC that has been delivering the same spring water to roughly this same spot for over two thousand years. The Roman legend behind the name says a young woman, a virgo, once led thirsty soldiers to the spring; whether or not that's true, the aqueduct itself is real and still functioning.
Did you know? About 26 metres high and 49 metres wide, the Trevi is often called the largest Baroque fountain in the world.
11 Spanish Steps
Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti
Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.906° N 12.483° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The Spanish Steps are Rome's great outdoor staircase, climbing a steep 29-metre slope from the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti on the shoulder of the Pincian Hill.
Did you know? Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck were filmed on the steps for Roman Holiday (1953), and they also appear in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
12 Miramare Castle
Castello di Miramare
Italy · 7.7 km from Trieste45.702° N 13.712° E
Image by bogitw from Pixabay Miramare is the house of a man who wanted to be a sailor and ended as an emperor in front of a firing squad. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of Franz Joseph of Austria and from 1854 commander of the Imperial Navy, chose a bare limestone spur on the Gulf of Trieste for his home; local tradition says he found it while sheltering from a storm in the little harbour of Grignano.
Did you know? In the castle's great hall on 10 April 1864 Maximilian formally accepted the crown of Mexico from a delegation of Mexican notables.
13 Baths of Caracalla
Terme di Caracalla
Italy · 2.2 km from Rome41.880° N 12.493° E
Image by pcdazero from Pixabay Few ruins in Rome convey the scale of imperial ambition as bluntly as the Baths of Caracalla. Begun under Septimius Severus and inaugurated by his son Caracalla in AD 216, the complex occupied a walled rectangle of roughly 337 by 328 metres on the southern edge of the city, on land that had once been a garden estate.
Did you know? At least 252 columns stood in the complex; the eight giant columns of the frigidarium weighed close to 100 tonnes each.
14 Stromboli
Isola di Stromboli
Italy38.804° N 15.223° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Wolfgang_Hasselmann from Pixabay Stromboli is a volcano you can watch breathing. The island is simply the top of a cone that rises 926 metres above the Tyrrhenian Sea and continues more than two and a half kilometres below it, and it has been erupting almost without pause for somewhere between two and five thousand years. Every few minutes to every hour or so, a crater near the summit throws up a burst of glowing fragments, then falls quiet again.
Did you know? Jules Verne ended Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) with his explorers shot out of the volcano onto the slopes of Stromboli.
15 Milano Centrale
Stazione di Milano Centrale
Italy · 1.5 km from Milan45.486° N 9.204° E
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milano Centrale is less a railway station than a monument to arrival. Its main front, facing Piazza Duca d'Aosta, stretches about 200 metres wide and some 50 metres high, a massive stone wall of arches, columns, reliefs and sculpture that reads more like a palace or a temple than a place to catch a train.
Did you know? Its cornerstone was laid by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1906, years before any design for the building had actually been chosen.
16 Certosa di Pavia
Italy · 24.3 km from Milan45.257° N 9.148° E
Image by Paskvi from Pixabay Carthusian monks were meant to live in silence and plainness, which makes the Certosa di Pavia one of the great contradictions of Italian art: a charterhouse for a handful of hermits whose church front is among the most lavishly carved façades of the Renaissance.
Did you know? In August 1946 the body of Benito Mussolini, stolen from a Milan cemetery months earlier, was discovered hidden inside the Certosa complex.
17 St Mark's Basilica
Basilica di San Marco
Italy · 0.6 km from Venice45.434° N 12.340° E
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay St Mark's is not a cathedral that grew out of a bishop's church; it was the private chapel of the Doge and the state sanctuary of the Venetian Republic, and it became the city's cathedral only in 1807. It was built to house the body of St Mark, which, according to medieval chronicles, two Venetian merchants took from Alexandria in 828.
Did you know? According to tradition, the merchants smuggled St Mark's body out of Alexandria hidden under pork, which Muslim customs officials would not touch.
18 Bridge of Sighs
Ponte dei Sospiri
Italy · 0.7 km from Venice45.434° N 12.341° E
Image by nicolaluisa from Pixabay The name is younger than the bridge, and it was invented by a foreigner who never saw it used for its actual purpose.
Did you know? The bridge was designed by Antonio Contin, nephew and pupil of Antonio da Ponte, the architect who rebuilt the Rialto Bridge.
19 Neptune's Grotto
Grotte di Nettuno
Italy · 39.2 km from Sassari40.565° N 8.160° E
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Neptune's Grotto opens at the foot of Capo Caccia, a sheer headland on the coast near Alghero. Its mouth sits barely a metre above the Mediterranean under cliffs about 110 metres high, and that position decides everything about a visit: the cave can only be entered when the sea is calm.
Did you know? For the 1978 film shoot, the crew built a small ship and a Jules Verne-style platform inside the cave, which became a set for about two months.
20 Royal Palace of Caserta
Reggia di Caserta
Italy · 1.7 km from Caserta41.073° N 14.327° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by libellule789 from Pixabay The Royal Palace of Caserta was built to rival Versailles, and in sheer size it outdoes almost every royal house of the eighteenth century. Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples and later Charles III of Spain, wanted a new court and seat of government protected from attack by sea and away from crowded, restless Naples, and in 1752 work began to designs by Luigi Vanvitelli.
Did you know? King Charles laid the first stone himself on 20 January 1752, the day of his 36th birthday, yet he abdicated in 1759 and never spent a night there.
21 Castellana Caves
Grotte di Castellana
Italy · 35.2 km from Bari40.876° N 17.149° E
Alessandro e Damiano · CC BY 4.0 The Castellana Caves exist on record because of a job that had nothing to do with finding them. In January 1938, the Provincial Tourist Board of Bari brought in Franco Anelli, a speleologist from the Italian Institute of Speleology, simply to assess some already-known local caves for their tourism potential.
Did you know? Between 1953 and 1986 eight films were shot inside the caves.
22 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza
Teatro Olimpico
Italy45.550° N 11.549° E
Didier Descouens · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza is the last design of Andrea Palladio and one of only three Renaissance theatres to survive, together with those of Sabbioneta and Parma. It was commissioned in 1580 by the Accademia Olimpica, the city's society of scholars and gentlemen, of which Palladio was himself a member.
Did you know? The street scenes look as if they run far into the distance, yet the sets actually recede only a few metres behind the stage wall.
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 film locations in Italy?
- On our list, Colosseum ranks first, followed by La Scala and Lake Garda.
- Which film made the Trevi Fountain famous?
- Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), in which Anita Ekberg wades into the fountain at night and calls out to Marcello Mastroianni.
- Was Star Wars filmed on Mount Etna?
- Real footage of Etna erupting in the early 2000s was used for the volcanic planet Mustafar in Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith (2005).
- Which film is named after Stromboli?
- Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Ingrid Bergman, was shot on the volcanic island and includes scenes of an eruption.
- How many film locations are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 22 film locations.