The Most Beautiful Places in Tuscany
37 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Tuscany are Florence Cathedral, Pitigliano and Cascate del Mulino. The list covers 37 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Tuscany packs two very different kinds of beauty into one region. Its rolling hills of cypress, vine and olive grew around medieval city-states that competed in stone, and that rivalry, followed by Medici patronage, made Florence the workshop of the Renaissance. Siena, Pisa and the hill towns kept their medieval cores, so walls, towers and civic squares survive to a degree rare even in Italy, while volcanic ground in the south feeds warm springs that have been bathed in since Roman times.
Florence dominates here. The Uffizi, built by Vasari for Cosimo I de' Medici, holds Botticelli's Birth of Venus; across the Arno the Boboli Gardens climb the hill behind Palazzo Pitti. Michelangelo's David, carved from a single block of marble, now stands in the Accademia, and his staircase for the Laurentian Library is one of the most inventive pieces of architecture of its century. Cellini's bronze Perseus raises the head of Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi beside Palazzo Vecchio, and the Ponte Vecchio still carries its row of shops over the river.
Beyond Florence the medieval world takes over. Pisa's Piazza del Duomo sets cathedral, baptistery and the Leaning Tower on a lawn of white marble. In Siena, the striped cathedral hides an inlaid marble floor, and the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo fills twice a summer for the Palio horse race. San Gimignano still bristles with the towers its feuding families raised in the Middle Ages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florence Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 2 | Pitigliano | Most beautiful village | |
| 3 | Cascate del Mulino | Hot spring | |
| 4 | Piazza del Duomo, Pisa | Square | ✓ |
| 5 | San Gimignano | Most beautiful village | |
| 6 | Abbey of San Galgano | Ruins | |
| 7 | Piazza del Campo | Square | ✓ |
| 8 | Ponte Vecchio | Bridge | ✓ |
| 9 | Uffizi Gallery | Museum | |
| 10 | Boboli Gardens | Historic garden | ✓ |
| 11 | David | Sculpture | |
| 12 | Siena Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 13 | Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana | Library building | |
| 14 | Perseus with the Head of Medusa | Sculpture | |
| 15 | Palazzo Pitti | Museum | |
| 16 | Palazzo Vecchio | Palace | |
| 17 | Leaning Tower of Pisa | Bell tower | ✓ |
| 18 | Torre del Mangia | Bell tower | |
| 19 | Florence Baptistery | Church building | |
| 20 | Pisa Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 21 | Giotto's Campanile | Bell tower | |
| 22 | Ponte della Maddalena | Bridge | |
| 23 | Piazza dell'Anfiteatro | Square | |
| 24 | Piazzale Michelangelo | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 25 | Monteriggioni | City walls | |
| 26 | Great Synagogue of Florence | Synagogue | |
| 27 | Florence Charterhouse | Carthusian monastery | |
| 28 | Tarot Garden | Sculpture garden | |
| 29 | Bagno Vignoni | Hot spring | |
| 30 | Medici Chapels | Mausoleum |
01 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 Santa Maria del Fiore took 140 years to build, and its defining feature was an engineering problem nobody could solve when construction began.
Did you know? Lightning struck the gilded copper ball crowning the lantern on 17 July 1600 and sent it crashing to the ground.
02 Pitigliano
Italy42.634° N 11.668° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Image by felix_w from Pixabay Pitigliano seems to grow straight out of the rock. Its houses rise sheer from the edge of a great spur of volcanic tuff, wall upon wall, so that it is hard to tell where the cliff ends and the buildings begin.
Did you know? The Etruscan rock-cut roads around the town range from less than a metre to over 10 metres deep, with channels and sometimes steps carved into their floors.
03 Cascate del Mulino
Italy42.648° N 11.513° E
Raimond Spekking · CC BY-SA 4.0 Below the hill village of Saturnia in southern Tuscany, warm water spills over a low ledge beside an old mill and runs down a staircase of pale, rounded pools.
Did you know? The papal bull of 1188 was issued by Pope Clement III to the canons of Sovana, and it listed the baths among the diocese's landholdings.
04 Piazza del Duomo, Pisa
Piazza dei Miracoli
Italy · 0.5 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.395° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Pauline_17 from Pixabay Pisa's cathedral square is less a square than a lawn: a walled field on which four white marble buildings stand apart from one another like pieces set on a green cloth. The writer Gabriele D'Annunzio called it the meadow of miracles in a 1910 novel, and the name Piazza dei Miracoli has stuck.
Did you know? After a fire in 1595 destroyed the cathedral's main doors, new bronze doors were made by the workshop of Giambologna.
05 San Gimignano
Italy · 30 km from Siena43.468° N 11.043° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay San Gimignano announces itself from miles away across the Val d'Elsa: a hilltop crowned by square stone towers that rise above the vineyards like a cluster of medieval skyscrapers.
Did you know? M. C. Escher depicted the town's celebrated towers in a woodcut titled San Gimignano in 1923.
06 Abbey of San Galgano
Abbazia di San Galgano
Italy · 24.4 km from Siena43.149° N 11.155° E
Image by arretium from Pixabay The Cistercian abbey of San Galgano was raised between 1220 and 1268 near the site where the hermit-knight Galgano Guidotti had lived and died, and within decades it had become the most powerful Cistercian foundation in Tuscany, controlling substantial farmland and trade routes around Siena.
Did you know? Successive emperors, Frederick II among them, confirmed the abbey's privileges, which even included the right to mint its own coins.
07 Piazza del Campo
Italy · 1.5 km from Siena43.318° N 11.331° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zotx from Pixabay Piazza del Campo is a great tilted shell of red brick at the heart of Siena. Its fan of paving, divided by pale stone strips into nine segments, slopes down towards the Palazzo Pubblico, the Gothic town hall, whose slender brick tower, the Torre del Mangia, rises above the whole city.
Did you know? The Torre del Mangia rises about 102 metres, making it one of the tallest medieval towers in Italy, surpassed only by Cremona's Torrazzo.
08 Ponte Vecchio
Italy · 1.4 km from Florence43.768° N 11.253° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by twalmedia from Pixabay The bridge standing today isn't the original, or even the second. A Roman-era crossing at this narrowest point of the Arno was destroyed and rebuilt more than once, wiped out again by a flood in 1117, rebuilt, then destroyed once more in the catastrophic flood of 1333.
Did you know? A bronze bust of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini by Raffaello Romanelli has stood at the centre of the bridge since 1900.
09 Uffizi Gallery
Palazzo degli Uffizi
Italy · 1.4 km from Florence43.768° N 11.255° E
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay The Uffizi began as offices. In 1560 Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari, painter and architect, to build a single home for the magistracies, guilds and agencies of Florence, hence the name, "the offices".
Did you know? So that no smell would reach the duke's private passage, the butchers on the Ponte Vecchio were moved out, and goldsmiths had taken over their shops by 1593.
10 Boboli Gardens
Giardino di Boboli
Italy · 1.6 km from Florence43.765° N 11.250° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by psychographism from Pixabay Florence is the city of the Medici, and the Boboli Gardens are where that family turned a hillside into a statement of power. Rising behind the Pitti Palace, the main residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany, the garden was begun in the mid-16th century for Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici.
Did you know? The Neptune statue's fountain is nicknamed the Fountain of the Pitchfork, after the god's trident.
11 David
Italy · 0.8 km from Florence43.777° N 11.259° E
Image by twalmedia from Pixabay 17 metres tall, carved by Michelangelo between 1501 and 1504. It was the first colossal marble statue made since classical antiquity, and it set the standard for sculpture in the century that followed. The block itself had a history before Michelangelo touched it.
Did you know? The marble was only an ordinary grade of Carrara stone, not the prized statuario, and had reached Florence by barge up the Arno.
12 Siena Cathedral
Duomo di Siena
Italy · 1.7 km from Siena43.318° N 11.329° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Anajim from Pixabay Siena's cathedral is the product of a city that wanted to outdo Florence and very nearly did. Built between about 1215 and 1263, it is clad inside and out in bands of white and dark green-black marble, the colours of Siena's black and white coat of arms, with red marble added on the facade.
Did you know? Pinturicchio frescoed the Piccolomini Library between 1502 and 1507; whether Raphael drew some of the designs is still debated.
13 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
Italy · 0.7 km from Florence43.775° N 11.255° E
No machine-readable author provided. Richardfabi~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain The Laurentian Library begins with a shock: a tall, narrow vestibule where columns are sunk into the walls, windows are blind, and a great staircase seems to pour down from the reading room like lava.
Did you know? The original Medici collection of about 3,000 manuscripts and books was rebound in red leather with the family arms and kept chained at the reading desks, called plutei.
14 Perseus with the Head of Medusa
Perseo con la testa di Medusa
Italy · 1.3 km from Florence43.769° N 11.256° E
Image by jkdvmim from Pixabay Under the open arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus stands on the slumped body of the Gorgon and holds her severed head aloft, snakes still writhing and blood pouring from the neck.
Did you know? After the casting, Cellini spent more than four years chasing and finishing the bronze, from December 1549 to April 1554.
15 Palazzo Pitti
Italy · 1.6 km from Florence43.765° N 11.250° E
Almaak · CC BY-SA 3.0 Florence's rulers lived on the south bank of the Arno, and their palace is the largest museum complex in the city. The core of Palazzo Pitti was begun in 1458 for the banker Luca Pitti, a rival of the Medici; Vasari credited the design to Brunelleschi, but it is now usually attributed to Luca Fancelli.
16 Palazzo Vecchio
Italy · 1.3 km from Florence43.769° N 11.256° E
Image by user32212 from Pixabay A fortress-like block of rough-cut stone, crowned with projecting battlements and a slender tower rising 94 metres above Piazza della Signoria, the Palazzo Vecchio has been the seat of Florentine government for more than seven centuries and still houses the city's mayor.
Did you know? According to legend, Vasari preserved Leonardo's battle scene behind a false wall before painting his own fresco; searches for it have so far been inconclusive.
17 Leaning Tower of Pisa
Torre di Pisa
Italy · 0.4 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.397° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MaxiDesigns from Pixabay The tower started leaning almost as soon as it was built, and everyone building it noticed.
Did you know? The foundations go down only about three metres, which explains why the tower began sinking once the second floor was reached in 1178.
18 Torre del Mangia
Italy · 1.4 km from Siena43.318° N 11.332° E
Image by roberto_bellasio from Pixabay Siena's great square, the Piazza del Campo, slopes down like a scallop shell towards a single point, and at that point, beside the Palazzo Pubblico, the Torre del Mangia goes straight up.
Did you know? The last Mangia, a travertine warrior carved by Angiolo Bini in 1759, was taken down in 1780 and forgotten in the town hall's storerooms.
19 Florence Baptistery
Battistero di San Giovanni
Italy · 0.9 km from Florence43.773° N 11.255° E
Zairon · CC BY 4.0 The Baptistery of San Giovanni is the building Florentines have always treated as the soul of their city. Every child was baptised here, Dante among them; the feast of St John on 24 June is still a city holiday; and Filippo Brunelleschi considered it a near-perfect building that inspired his studies of perspective.
Did you know? Brunelleschi claimed to find only one error in the building: an attic entablature that bends from horizontal to vertical, against classical rules.
20 Pisa Cathedral
Duomo di Pisa
Italy · 0.5 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.396° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay On Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli the Leaning Tower draws the crowds, but the cathedral was there first and it is the reason the tower exists at all: the campanile is simply its bell tower.
21 Giotto's Campanile
Campanile di Giotto
Italy · 0.9 km from Florence43.773° N 11.256° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Of all the marble-clad buildings around Florence's cathedral square, the slender bell tower is the most perfectly proportioned.
22 Ponte della Maddalena
Italy · 31.9 km from Pisa43.986° N 10.552° E
Giaccai · CC BY-SA 4.0 A single enormous arch springs from one bank of the Serchio and lands on the other, so steep and lopsided that the roadway climbs almost like a staircase to its crown: the Ponte della Maddalena, better known as the Devil's Bridge, is one of the boldest pieces of medieval engineering in Tuscany.
Did you know? The great central arch rises about 18 metres above the Serchio, and the whole bridge has five unequal arches arranged asymmetrically.
23 Piazza dell'Anfiteatro
Italy · 16.3 km from Pisa43.845° N 10.506° E
Kasa Fue · CC BY-SA 4.0 From the air, Lucca's Piazza dell'Anfiteatro reads like a fingerprint of Roman engineering: a closed oval of tall, pastel-coloured houses whose curving back walls trace exactly the line of the arena that stood here almost two thousand years ago.
Did you know? Around 55 wedge-shaped chambers radiated around the arena, supporting the seating and opening outwards as arches.
24 Piazzale Michelangelo
Italy · 2.3 km from Florence43.763° N 11.265° E
Michael Wittwer · CC BY-SA 4.0 Florence is a city of narrow streets and high walls, and from most of it you see the Duomo only in fragments — a slice of marble at the end of an alley, a curve of red tile over a rooftop. Piazzale Michelangelo is where the whole city finally assembles itself.
Did you know? Just east of the terrace lies the Giardino dell'Iris, opened in May 1957 to host an international iris-breeding competition first announced by the city in 1954.
25 Monteriggioni
Italy · 12.1 km from Siena43.367° N 11.218° E
Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from the road below, Monteriggioni is a crown of stone set on a low hill: an almost unbroken ring of medieval wall, studded with square towers, enclosing a small village.
Did you know? Siena bought the hilltop from the Da Staggia family, and work began under the podestà Guelfo da Porcari around 1214.
26 Great Synagogue of Florence
Sinagoga di Firenze
Italy · 1.5 km from Florence43.773° N 11.266° E
דני · CC BY-SA 2.5 Florence's Jewish community gained full civic rights in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1848, and a generation later it built a synagogue meant to be seen from anywhere in the city. The money came from the will of David Levi, president of the Jewish community, who left funds for a new synagogue "worthy of the city".
Did you know? During the German occupation in the Second World War, the synagogue was seized and used as a storehouse.
27 Florence Charterhouse
Certosa di Firenze
Italy · 5.9 km from Florence43.731° N 11.221° E
Mattana · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Florence Charterhouse crowns Monte Acuto, a hill on the southern edge of Florence where the Ema and Greve rivers meet, and its long mass of walls, loggias and roofs gives it the air of a small fortified town.
Did you know? Several of Pontormo's Passion scenes borrow their compositions from woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer.
28 Tarot Garden
Giardino dei Tarocchi
Italy42.426° N 11.466° E
DustyLosAngeles · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Tarot Garden is the life's great work of Niki de Saint Phalle: a hillside in southern Tuscany populated by huge, brilliantly coloured sculptures based on the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana of the tarot.
Did you know? The total cost is estimated at around five million dollars, roughly ten billion lire at the time, with no public funding involved.
29 Bagno Vignoni
Italy · 38.8 km from Siena43.028° N 11.619° E
Image by alefolsom from Pixabay Most villages are built around a square; Bagno Vignoni is built around a pool. At the heart of this tiny hamlet in southern Tuscany, where a market place would normally be, lies a large rectangular basin of steaming thermal water, enclosed by old stone houses, with the church of St John the Baptist close by.
Did you know? The cluster of houses around the pool grew out of a castle that once belonged to the Amerighi family.
30 Medici Chapels
Cappelle medicee
Italy · 0.6 km from Florence43.775° N 11.253° E
No machine-readable author provided. Richardfabi~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Two very different rooms behind the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence make up the Medici Chapels, and between them they show the family that ruled Florence and then Tuscany at two extremes of taste.
Did you know? When Giovan Battista Strozzi wrote an epigram praising the statue of Night, Michelangelo answered it with verses of his own.
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 Tuscany?
- On our list, Florence Cathedral ranks first, followed by Pitigliano and Cascate del Mulino.
- Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?
- The tower stands on soft, uneven subsoil of clay and sand, and it began to tilt while it was still being built in the late 12th century. Engineering work completed in 2001 removed soil from under the higher side and reduced the lean without straightening it.
- Why does San Gimignano have so many towers?
- In the Middle Ages the town's wealthy families built tower houses as defences and as symbols of status, each trying to outdo its rivals. Many were later torn down, but more than a dozen survive and give the town its famous skyline.
- Where is Michelangelo's David today?
- The original statue has been in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence since 1873, when it was moved indoors to protect it. A copy stands on its first site in front of Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Tuscany?
- In our collection, the places in Tuscany are most often hot springs (4), churches (4), squares (4) and museums (4).
- How many places are on this list in Tuscany?
- The list covers 37 places.