The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in Italy
10 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in Italy are Boboli Gardens, Hundred-Horse Chestnut and Piani di Castelluccio. The list covers 10 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The Renaissance garden was born in Italy. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century patrons in Florence and Rome treated the hillside villa as a stage, laying out terraces, staircases, grottoes and fountains that used water as theatre, and these gardens set the pattern for the rest of Europe. Italy's farmed landscapes carry the same sense of composition, from vine-covered hills in Piedmont and the Veneto to high mountain plains that flower each summer.
Behind the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Medici's Boboli Gardens climb the hill in avenues, statues and grottoes. Villa d'Este at Tivoli is built around hundreds of fountains fed by gravity alone, and Villa Lante at Bagnaia sends a single stream of water down its terraces through a chain of basins. The Garden of Ninfa south of Rome grows among the ruins of an abandoned medieval town, Villa del Balbianello sits on a wooded point on Lake Como, and Villa Cimbrone in Ravello ends at a terrace high above the Amalfi coast.
The countryside belongs here as much as the villas. The vineyards of Langhe-Roero and Monferrato in Piedmont and the steep Prosecco hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene are both UNESCO-listed wine landscapes. On the Piani di Castelluccio in Umbria, the lentil fields flower in patches of colour beneath the Sibillini mountains, and on the slopes of Etna the Hundred-Horse Chestnut is among the oldest and largest chestnut trees known.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boboli Gardens | Historic garden | ✓ |
| 2 | Hundred-Horse Chestnut | Remarkable tree | |
| 3 | Piani di Castelluccio | Protected area | |
| 4 | Villa d'Este | Historic garden | ✓ |
| 5 | Garden of Ninfa | Historic garden | |
| 6 | Villa del Balbianello | Historic garden | |
| 7 | Villa Lante | Historic garden | |
| 8 | Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene | Vineyard landscape | |
| 9 | Langhe-Roero and Monferrato Vineyards | Vineyard landscape | |
| 10 | Villa Cimbrone | Historic garden |
01 Boboli Gardens
Giardino di Boboli
Italy · 1.6 km from Florence43.765° N 11.250° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by psychographism from Pixabay The main axis climbs straight up from the palace. First comes the amphitheatre, dug into the slope and later lined with stone, with an ancient Egyptian obelisk brought from the Medici villa in Rome at its centre. Above it a double ramp leads to the Fountain of Neptune, made by Stoldo Lorenzi in the 1560s; its basin once doubled as the reservoir for the aqueduct that carried spring water down to the city.
Did you know? Expanded in the 17th century, the gardens cover about 45,000 square metres of hillside.
02 Hundred-Horse Chestnut
Castagno dei Cento Cavalli
Italy · 28 km from Catania37.749° N 15.132° E
Rabe! · CC BY-SA 4.0 Above ground the tree has divided into several massive trunks that share a single root system, so that what looks like a small grove is in fact one living organism. When it was measured in 1780 its trunk had a circumference of 57.9 m, a figure recorded by Guinness World Records as the greatest tree girth ever measured. It grows on the fertile volcanic soils of the mountain about 8 km from the summit crater, in a landscape of chestnut woods.
Did you know? The French artist Jean-Pierre Houël painted the tree in gouache around 1777 during his tour of Sicily.
03 Piani di Castelluccio
Italy42.812° N 13.209° E
Image by resolfa from Pixabay The basin is the floor of an ancient Apennine lake. Glacial and alluvial deposits filled it and karst processes now drain it: the water gathered by the Fosso dei Mergani disappears into sinkholes and flows away underground, so there is no lake today, only a flat, grassy floor. The climate is harsh for Italy, and winter temperatures on the plain can fall below −30 °C.
Did you know? A late 16th-century report described some 40,000 sheep and other animals driven up from the Roman Campagna each summer to graze the plain.
04 Villa d'Este
Italy · 27.1 km from Rome41.962° N 12.796° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by lapping from Pixabay The garden falls away in terraces cut into the hillside of Tivoli, and every one of them is organised around water. A branch of the Aniene was diverted to feed it, and the whole system still runs on gravity alone, with no pumps. The numbers are almost comic in their excess: some fifty fountains and nymphaea, hundreds of spouts and jets, dozens of cascades and more than two hundred basins.
Did you know? The restored water organ now sounds through 144 pipes, against 22 in the original mechanism devised by the Frenchman Claude Venard.
05 Garden of Ninfa
Giardino di Ninfa
Italy41.578° N 12.950° E
WikiRomaWiki · CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1921 Gelasio Caetani began turning the ruins into an English-style landscape garden, and successive generations of the family carried the work on: Ada Bootle-Wilbraham brought in plants from her travels, and later Lelia Caetani and Hubert Howard shaped much of what visitors see today.
Did you know? In 1765 the Duke of Sermoneta turned the medieval town hall into a barn; later Gelasio Caetani restored it and the castle tower as a summer residence.
06 Villa del Balbianello
Italy · 19.7 km from Como45.965° N 9.202° E
Emibuzz · CC BY-SA 4.0 The site began as a Franciscan monastery, recorded from the thirteenth century, and two bell towers of its church still rise above the trees. In 1785 Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini bought the property and within two years had turned the convent into a villa for leisure and literary company.
Did you know? The writer Silvio Pellico tutored the owner's sons here before Austrian authorities arrested him in 1820, sending Luigi Porro Lambertenghi into exile in Belgium.
07 Villa Lante
Italy42.426° N 12.155° E
Orlando Paride · CC BY-SA 4.0 The garden was begun in the late 1560s for Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara, and its design is attributed to Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, one of the leading architects of Renaissance Rome. The Sienese engineer Tommaso Ghinucci handled the hydraulics. Instead of one large palace, the villa has two small, identical casini set side by side on the lowest terrace, so that the garden rather than the house dominates.
Did you know? A long stone table on one terrace has a channel of running water down its centre, used to keep wine cool while the cardinal entertained guests outdoors.
08 Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene
Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene
Italy · 31.5 km from Treviso45.953° N 12.226° E
Image by Francesco_Foti from Pixabay What gives these hills their particular look are the ciglioni: narrow terraces held not by stone walls but by grassy banks of earth that follow the contours of the slope and stabilise the soil. Used here since the seventeenth century, they produce a chequerboard effect, with rows of vines running both along and down the gradient.
Did you know? The earliest known written mention of the wine dates from 1593, when the English traveller Fynes Moryson spelled it Prosecho.
More about Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene →
09 Langhe-Roero and Monferrato Vineyards
Paesaggio vitivinicolo del Piemonte: Langhe-Roero e Monferrato
Italy · 35.3 km from Asti44.652° N 7.994° E
Megan Cole from Vancouver, Canada · CC BY 2.0 Each of the six components tells a different chapter. The Langa of Barolo and the hills of Barbaresco are the home of two of Italy's most celebrated red wines, and the villages that gave them their names sit on the ridgelines above their own vineyards. Nizza Monferrato is the land of Barbera.
Did you know? Recent research credits the modern dry Barolo to Paolo Francesco Staglieno, who worked on Cavour's Grinzane estate between 1836 and 1841.
10 Villa Cimbrone
Italy · 14.1 km from Salerno40.643° N 14.610° E
Image by luckysilver1 from Pixabay The villa itself is old. It is recorded from the eleventh century, belonged in turn to the Acconciajoco and Fusco families and later to a convent, and takes its name from Cimbronium, the rocky spur it stands on. Its present character dates from 1904, when the English banker Ernest William Beckett, later Lord Grimthorpe, bought the property and remade it, mixing neo-Gothic and classical elements: a cloister, a tea room, temples and grottoes.
Did you know? In 1861 the historian Ferdinand Gregorovius praised the view from the belvedere but was scathing about the marble statues lining it.
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 gardens, parks and forests in Italy?
- On our list, Boboli Gardens ranks first, followed by Hundred-Horse Chestnut and Piani di Castelluccio.
- What is an Italian Renaissance garden?
- An Italian Renaissance garden is a formal villa garden laid out on terraces, with axial paths, clipped hedges, sculpture, grottoes and fountains. Villa d'Este, Villa Lante and the Boboli Gardens are classic examples.
- What is the Garden of Ninfa?
- Ninfa is a romantic garden in Lazio planted in the twentieth century among the ruins of a medieval town that had been abandoned for centuries. A clear river runs through it, past ruined churches and towers covered with climbing roses.
- Why is it called the Hundred-Horse Chestnut?
- According to legend, a queen and her company of a hundred knights sheltered beneath the tree during a storm. The chestnut stands on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 10 gardens, parks and forests.