The Most Beautiful Places in Piedmont
11 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Piedmont are Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore, Sacra di San Michele and Langhe-Roero and Monferrato Vineyards. The list covers 11 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Piedmont means 'at the foot of the mountains', and the Alps wrap around the region on three sides before giving way to the rolling hills of the Langhe and Monferrato. For centuries it was the heartland of the House of Savoy, whose capital Turin became the first capital of united Italy in 1861, and the dukes and kings filled the region with fortresses, sanctuaries and palaces. In the twentieth century Turin became the home of Italian car-making.
The Mole Antonelliana, begun as a synagogue and finished as a soaring brick spire, defines the Turin skyline and now houses the National Museum of Cinema. The Lingotto, Fiat's former factory, still carries the test track that runs across its roof. At the mouth of the Susa valley, the Sacra di San Michele crowns the summit of Monte Pirchiriano, and in the Chisone valley the Fenestrelle Fort climbs the mountainside in a chain of walls linked by a long covered stairway.
On Lake Maggiore, the Borromeo family turned the rock of Isola Bella into a palace with terraced baroque gardens rising like a ship from the water. The Sanctuary of Vicoforte near Mondovì carries one of the largest elliptical domes in the world, and the Sacro Monte di Varallo leads pilgrims through chapels peopled with life-size painted figures. The vineyard hills of the Langhe, Roero and Monferrato, home of Barolo and Barbaresco, complete a landscape shaped by both faith and farming.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore | Island | |
| 2 | Sacra di San Michele | Abbey | |
| 3 | Langhe-Roero and Monferrato Vineyards | Vineyard landscape | |
| 4 | Lake Orta | Lake | |
| 5 | Mole Antonelliana | Observation tower | |
| 6 | Lake Maggiore | Lake | |
| 7 | Fenestrelle Fort | Fortress | |
| 8 | Lingotto (Fiat factory), Turin | Factory | |
| 9 | Sanctuary of Oropa | Pilgrimage site | |
| 10 | Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Mondovi | Pilgrimage site | |
| 11 | Sacro Monte di Varallo | Church building | ✓ |
01 Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore
Isola Bella
Italy · 36 km from Lugano45.895° N 8.527° E
Image by maxmann from Pixabay Isola Bella rises from Lake Maggiore like a ship of stone: a Baroque palace at one end and, at the other, gardens stacked in terraces above the water, the whole island given over to a single family's vision.
Did you know? A gallery of six 16th-century Flemish tapestries in silk and gold repeats the unicorn, emblem of the Borromeo family.
02 Sacra di San Michele
Italy · 25.7 km from Turin45.098° N 7.343° E
Federico_Milesi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Local tradition credits the sanctuary's origin to a vision: Giovanni Vincenzo, a hermit who had once served as archbishop of Ravenna, is said to have been commanded by the Archangel Michael to build a shrine on the summit of Mount Pirchiriano, and the legend adds — perhaps to explain away how quickly it was finished…
Did you know? Squeezed onto the peak, the church reverses the usual layout: its façade lies below the high altar, with the apses rising above it.
03 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 The hills south of Turin are one of the rare landscapes where a single crop has drawn the whole map.
Did you know? Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the statesman of Italian unification, lived at Grinzane from 1830 and served as its mayor from 1832 to 1849.
04 Lake Orta
Lago d'Orta
Italy45.810° N 8.396° E
Image by fabiovaleggia from Pixabay Lake Orta is the westernmost and one of the smallest of the great lakes below the Italian Alps, a narrow sheet of water some 13 km long and about 18 square kilometres in area, wrapped in wooded hills in northern Piedmont.
Did you know? The Sacro Monte of Orta has twenty chapels on the life of Saint Francis, begun in 1591.
05 Mole Antonelliana
Italy · 2 km from Turin45.069° N 7.693° E
Image by nonmisvegliate from Pixabay 5 metres in all. The Mole Antonelliana takes its name from its architect, Alessandro Antonelli, and from the Italian word mole, a building of monumental size.
Did you know? The Mole held the title of the world's tallest masonry building until 1908.
06 Lake Maggiore
Lago Maggiore
Italy · 22.3 km from Lugano46.098° N 8.715° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Lake Maggiore is the long, winding lake that runs for about 64 km from Locarno in Switzerland to Arona in Italy, on the southern side of the Alps.
07 Fenestrelle Fort
Forte di Fenestrelle
Italy45.032° N 7.057° E
Sylvain05 · CC BY-SA 4.0 A single chain of bastions, barracks and batteries climbs a whole mountainside above the Chisone Valley in Piedmont, linked from bottom to top by a covered stairway of nearly 4,000 steps.
Did you know? Building began at the very top, on Monte Pinaia at about 1,780 metres, so the summit works could rake any enemy attacking the lower forts.
08 Lingotto (Fiat factory), Turin
Lingotto
Italy · 4.8 km from Turin45.029° N 7.664° E
FrDr · CC BY-SA 4.0 Most factories hide their logic inside; Lingotto wears it on the outside. Fiat built it in the south of Turin between 1916 and 1923 to designs by Giacomo Mattè-Trucco, and the idea was as simple as it was audacious.
Did you know? King Victor Emmanuel III attended the factory's inauguration on 22 May 1923, although construction work continued until about 1930.
09 Sanctuary of Oropa
Santuario di Oropa
Italy45.628° N 7.979° E
Alfiere33 · CC BY-SA 4.0 High in a natural amphitheatre of the Biellese Alps, at roughly 1,160 metres, the Sanctuary of Oropa is less a single church than a small mountain town built for the Virgin.
Did you know? Filippo Juvarra, architect to the House of Savoy, designed the sanctuary's monumental Royal Gate in the 18th century.
10 Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Mondovi
Santuario di Vicoforte
Italy44.363° N 7.863° E
Mattis · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Sanctuary of Vicoforte, near Mondovì in Piedmont, is crowned by the largest elliptical dome in the world: an oval shell about 37 metres long and 25 metres wide on its axes, rising to some 74 metres above the floor.
Did you know? The story of the image bleeding appears in no contemporary source, whereas letters and a bishop's description from 1595 do record the bullet hole.
11 Sacro Monte di Varallo
Sacro monte di Varallo
Italy45.819° N 8.255° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Sacro Monte di Varallo is a pilgrimage complex designed as a New Jerusalem on a mountainside: 45 chapels climbing a wooded terrace above the town of Varallo Sesia, filled with more than 800 life-size figures in painted terracotta and wood, set against frescoed walls so that each scene of the life of Christ becomes…
Did you know? The sculptural group of the Massacre of the Innocents was completed around 1600 by the sculptor Giacomo Paracca from Valsolda.
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 Piedmont?
- On our list, Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore ranks first, followed by Sacra di San Michele and Langhe-Roero and Monferrato Vineyards.
- What is on the roof of the Lingotto building in Turin?
- The Lingotto carries a banked test track on its roof, where Fiat once drove newly assembled cars after they had moved up through the floors of the factory. The building opened in the 1920s and was later converted into a cultural and commercial centre.
- What is the Sacra di San Michele?
- It is a medieval abbey dedicated to Saint Michael, built on the summit of Monte Pirchiriano above the Susa valley. It is the symbol of Piedmont and is said to have inspired the abbey in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
- What does the name Piedmont mean?
- Piedmont comes from the medieval Latin for 'foot of the mountains', describing its position below the arc of the Western Alps.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Piedmont?
- In our collection, the places in Piedmont are most often lakes (2), pilgrimage sites (2), islands (1) and churches (1).
- How many places are on this list in Piedmont?
- The list covers 11 places.