The Most Beautiful Places in Lombardy
21 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Lombardy are Lake Como, Milan Cathedral and Stelvio Pass. The list covers 21 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Lombardy climbs from the rice fields of the Po plain to the high Alps, with the great lakes of Como, Garda and Maggiore filling the valleys in between. That mix of rich farmland, Alpine passes and trade made Milan one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, and the Visconti, the Sforza and the Gonzaga of Mantua paid for some of Italy's finest buildings and paintings.
Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386, took centuries to finish and bristles with spires and statues of marble. La Scala opened in 1778 and became one of the most famous opera houses in the world, and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II covers its crossing with a glass and iron dome. In the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo's Last Supper survives on the wall where he painted it. The Monumental Cemetery and the massive Milano Centrale station show the city's later ambition in stone.
Beyond Milan, the Certosa di Pavia, founded by the Visconti, has one of the richest marble façades of the Italian Renaissance, and in Mantua Giulio Romano's Palazzo del Te ends in the painted Chamber of the Giants. Scaligero Castle rises from the water at Sirmione on Lake Garda, Santa Caterina del Sasso clings to a cliff above Lake Maggiore, the rock drawings of Valcamonica record thousands of years of prehistoric life, and the Stelvio Pass winds up to more than 2,700 metres.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Como | Lake | |
| 2 | Milan Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 3 | Stelvio Pass | Mountain pass | |
| 4 | Villa del Balbianello | Historic garden | |
| 5 | Saint Catherine of the Rock | Abbey | |
| 6 | Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II | Covered passageway | |
| 7 | Strada della Forra | Mountain pass | |
| 8 | Certosa di Pavia | Carthusian monastery | |
| 9 | La Scala | Opera house | |
| 10 | Monumental Cemetery of Milan | Cemetery | |
| 11 | Rock Drawings in Valcamonica | Petroglyph | |
| 12 | Milano Centrale | Railway station | |
| 13 | The Last Supper | Museum | |
| 14 | Scaligero Castle | Castle | |
| 15 | Palazzo del Te | Palace | |
| 16 | Bosco Verticale | Skyscraper | |
| 17 | Cappella Colleoni | Mausoleum | |
| 18 | Palazzo Ducale, Mantua | Palace | |
| 19 | Teatro Bibiena | Theatre building | |
| 20 | San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore | Church building | |
| 21 | Taccani Hydroelectric Power Station | Hydroelectric power station |
01 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.
02 Milan Cathedral
Duomo di Milano
Italy · 1.3 km from Milan45.464° N 9.191° E
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan Cathedral took almost six centuries to finish. Work began in 1386 under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo, at a moment when his cousin Gian Galeazzo Visconti had just taken power in the city; the last bronze portal was inaugurated only on 6 January 1965.
Did you know? A meridian line laid in the floor in 1786 by Brera Observatory astronomers uses a hole 24 metres up to fix solar noon to within seconds.
03 Stelvio Pass
Passo dello Stelvio
Italy46.530° N 10.454° E
Image by gavia26210 from Pixabay The Stelvio Pass, Passo dello Stelvio in Italian and Stilfser Joch in German, carries a road over the Ortler Alps at 2,757 metres, the highest paved pass in the Eastern Alps and only a few metres lower than the highest in the whole range.
Did you know? In the 1848 revolution a handful of Lombard insurgents closed the road simply by setting fire to its wooden avalanche galleries above Trafoi.
04 Villa del Balbianello
Italy · 19.7 km from Como45.965° N 9.202° E
Emibuzz · CC BY-SA 4.0 Villa del Balbianello occupies the tip of the Dosso d'Avedo, a wooded spur that pushes out into the south-western arm of Lake Como near Lenno. Because the promontory is almost an island, the garden has water on three sides, and every terrace looks down onto the lake rather than across a lawn.
Did you know? Cardinal Durini bought the headland only after failing to acquire the nearby Isola Comacina, which lies about 1.5 km away across the water.
05 Saint Catherine of the Rock
Eremo di Santa Caterina del Sasso
Italy · 31.8 km from Lugano45.878° N 8.597° E
Image by Paskvi from Pixabay The story begins with a shipwreck. Alberto Besozzi, a merchant and moneylender from nearby Arolo, was caught in a storm on Lake Maggiore around 1170 and survived by washing up on the rocks below where the hermitage now stands.
Did you know? The small shrine where Besozzi's relics rest was built to match the dimensions of Saint Catherine's tomb on Mount Sinai.
06 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.466° N 9.190° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is Milan's great glass-roofed arcade, a cross of two covered streets joining the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Scala, with an octagon and a dome where the arms meet.
Did you know? Part of the money for the project was to come from a public lottery authorised by royal decree.
07 Strada della Forra
Strada provinciale 38 della Forra
Italy45.764° N 10.758° E
Il sottoscritto · Public domain The Strada della Forra — the "road of the gorge" — climbs from the shore of Lake Garda to the high plateau of Tremosine in a little over six kilometres, and few roads anywhere pack so much drama into so short a distance.
Did you know? The cost was shared out: the Italian state paid half, while the Province of Brescia and the municipality each covered a quarter.
08 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? The founding community was tiny: just twelve Carthusian monks living in full enclosure in one of Italy's most lavish religious complexes.
09 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.
Did you know? Puccini's Turandot, left unfinished at the composer's death, received its first performance at La Scala in 1926.
10 Monumental Cemetery of Milan
Cimitero monumentale di Milano
Italy · 2.4 km from Milan45.486° N 9.179° E
Paolobon140 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan's Cimitero Monumentale is less a graveyard than an open-air museum of sculpture, a city of marble temples, obelisks, chapels and statuary in which the families of industrial and bourgeois Milan competed to commission the most striking memorial.
Did you know? The pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo are both buried here.
11 Rock Drawings in Valcamonica
Incisioni rupestri della Val Camonica
Italy46.024° N 10.350° E
Luca Giarelli · CC BY-SA 3.0 Valcamonica, the long valley of the river Oglio in the Lombard Alps, holds one of the largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the world.
Did you know? Copper Age carvings document novelties of their time, including the wheel, the wagon, ploughing scenes and the first signs of metalworking.
12 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? Stacchini designed a private Royal Pavilion for the king and his court, with a hidden escape route: a spiral stair concealed behind a bathroom mirror.
13 The Last Supper
Ultima Cena
Italy · 2.6 km from Milan45.467° N 9.171° E
Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain On the end wall of a former monastic dining hall in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci painted the moment just after Christ tells his twelve apostles that one of them will betray him.
Did you know? A painter named Giuseppe Mazza repainted almost the entire work in 1770, finishing all but three faces before public outrage stopped him.
14 Scaligero Castle
Castello scaligero di Sirmione
Italy · 30.4 km from Verona45.492° N 10.608° E
Image by kordi_vahle from Pixabay The Scaligero Castle rises straight out of Lake Garda at the narrow neck of the Sirmione peninsula, a compact brick-and-stone fortress whose walls are washed by water on every side.
Did you know? Its surviving architecture is usually dated to about 1360–1380, under Cansignorio and Antonio II della Scala, and the fortress seems to have been raised quickly to a single plan.
15 Palazzo del Te
Palazzo Te
Italy · 36.2 km from Verona45.148° N 10.787° E
Sailko · CC BY 3.0 Palazzo Te is a palace built as a joke for those who knew the rules. Federico II Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, commissioned it as a pleasure villa on the Isola del Te, a marshy island outside the city walls where his family kept its stables, and gave the job to Giulio Romano, Raphael's most gifted pupil.
Did you know? Four of the horses in the Hall of Horses are named in inscriptions: Morel Favorito, Glorioso, Battaglia and Dario.
16 Bosco Verticale
Italy · 1.8 km from Milan45.486° N 9.190° E
Kokky92 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Bosco Verticale — the "vertical forest" — is two residential towers in Milan's Porta Nuova district that carry a woodland on their balconies.
Did you know? Each tree grows in a concrete basin about 1.1 metres square, with large trees anchored by welded steel frames.
17 Cappella Colleoni
Italy · 0.7 km from Bergamo45.703° N 9.662° E
Daniele Napolitano · CC BY-SA 4.0 Squeezed against the flank of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo's upper town, the Colleoni Chapel announces itself with a façade unlike anything around it: a dense, almost jewelled surface of white, red and black marble lozenges, carved reliefs, statues, medallions and a large rose window, rising to an…
Did you know? In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III enquired where Colleoni was actually buried, decades before the body was located.
18 Palazzo Ducale, Mantua
Palazzo Ducale
Italy · 34.5 km from Verona45.160° N 10.799° E
Velvet · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Ducal Palace of Mantua is not one building but a small city of palaces, courtyards, galleries and gardens, assembled over several centuries by the Gonzaga, who ruled Mantua as lords, marquesses and dukes from the 14th century to the early 18th.
Did you know? Nine Flemish tapestries in the palace were woven from Raphael's cartoons for the Sistine Chapel and bought in Brussels by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga around 1552.
19 Teatro Bibiena
Italy · 34.8 km from Verona45.158° N 10.798° E
Geobia · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside the Teatro Bibiena, four tiers of wooden boxes curve around a small hall in the shape of a bell, each box painted with its own monochrome decoration, so that the whole interior feels like a jewel case turned inside out.
Did you know? The printed programme of Mozart's 1770 concert, which featured two of his symphonies and arias sung by tenor Vincenzo Uttini, survives in the academy's archive.
20 San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore
Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore
Italy · 2 km from Milan45.466° N 9.179° E
MarkusMark · CC BY-SA 3.0 Behind a sober grey-stone front on Corso Magenta hides one of the most completely painted interiors of the Italian Renaissance. Almost every surface of San Maurizio — walls, chapels, lunettes, vaults — is covered with sixteenth-century frescoes, and Milanese writers have long called it the city's own "Sistine Chapel".
Did you know? Four daughters of the patrons Alessandro Bentivoglio and Ippolita Sforza entered the convent, and one of them, Alessandra, served as abbess six times.
21 Taccani Hydroelectric Power Station
Centrale idroelettrica Taccani
Italy · 15.1 km from Bergamo45.613° N 9.521° E
Antonella Cappo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few power stations were built to look as though they had always belonged to their river. The Taccani hydroelectric plant sits at the foot of the rocky promontory where the Adda makes a sharp bend at Trezzo, directly beneath the ruins of the castle that Bernabò Visconti raised here around 1370.
Did you know? Locals often call it the Centrale Moretti, after its architect, rather than by the engineer's name it officially bears.
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 places in Lombardy?
- On our list, Lake Como ranks first, followed by Milan Cathedral and Stelvio Pass.
- Why is Leonardo's Last Supper so damaged?
- Leonardo painted it in the 1490s with tempera and oil on dry plaster rather than as a true fresco, so the paint soon began to flake. It has been restored many times, most recently in a project completed in 1999.
- How long did it take to build Milan Cathedral?
- Construction began in 1386, and work continued for centuries: the main façade was completed in the early nineteenth century at Napoleon's order, and details were still being finished in the twentieth.
- What are the rock drawings of Valcamonica?
- They are prehistoric engravings carved into rock surfaces across the Camonica Valley over several thousand years, showing hunting, farming, warriors and symbols. In 1979 they became Italy's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Lombardy?
- In our collection, the places in Lombardy are most often churches (2), palaces (2), theatres (2) and mountain passes (2).
- How many places are on this list in Lombardy?
- The list covers 21 places.