The Most Beautiful Sculptures in Italy
13 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sculptures in Italy are Trajan's Column, Column of Marcus Aurelius and Moses. The list covers 13 sculptures. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italy had everything sculpture needs at once: the white marble of the Apuan Alps above Carrara, quarried since Roman times; the ancient statues dug out of Roman soil that every Renaissance artist studied; and patrons, from emperors to popes and the Medici, who wanted stone to speak for their power. Statues here were rarely made for galleries. They were carved for tombs, chapels, fountains and city squares, and many still stand where they were meant to be seen.
The range runs across almost two thousand years. Trajan's Column in Rome winds a continuous band of relief around its shaft, telling the story of the emperor's wars in Dacia. In Florence, Michelangelo's David, carved from a single block between 1501 and 1504, shares the city with Cellini's bronze Perseus raising Medusa's head in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Michelangelo's horned Moses sits in San Pietro in Vincoli as part of the tomb of Julius II, while Bernini turned marble into flesh and cloth in Apollo and Daphne at the Galleria Borghese and in the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria.
Naples adds Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ, whose marble shroud seems transparent. The twentieth century appears too: the bronze Christ of the Abyss stands underwater in the bay of San Fruttuoso, and in Sicily Alberto Burri sealed the ruins of earthquake-struck Gibellina under a vast field of white concrete.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | |
| 2 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | |
| 3 | Moses | Sculpture | |
| 4 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | |
| 5 | David | Sculpture | |
| 6 | Perseus with the Head of Medusa | Sculpture | |
| 7 | Ecstasy of Saint Teresa | Sculpture | |
| 8 | Apollo and Daphne | Sculpture | |
| 9 | The Rape of Proserpina | Sculpture | |
| 10 | Farnese Hercules | Sculpture | |
| 11 | Veiled Christ | Sculpture | |
| 12 | Christ of the Abyss | Sculpture | |
| 13 | Cretto di Burri | Sculpture |
01 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 The column originally stood between the Greek and Latin halls of the Ulpian Library, whose upper floors gave readers a closer view of the reliefs. After Trajan's death in 117 the Senate had his ashes placed in golden urns inside the base. His statue on top vanished in the Middle Ages, and since 1587 the column has been crowned by a bronze Saint Peter placed by Pope Sixtus V. Because pollution has blurred the marble, plaster casts made in the 19th and 20th centuries are sometimes easier to read: complete sets can be seen in Bucharest and in the Cast Courts of London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Did you know? The carved band is not uniform: it widens from about 1 metre near the bottom to about 1.2 metres higher up, helping viewers read the upper scenes.
02 Column of Marcus Aurelius
Colonna di Marco Aurelio
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 By the 16th century about six metres of the monument lay buried under the rising ground level and the emperor's statue had long vanished. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V had the architect Domenico Fontana restore it: he dug out the base, repaired the cracks and crowned it with the bronze Saint Paul that still stands on top. Fontana also reclad the pedestal with marble and new inscriptions, one of which wrongly credits the column to Antoninus Pius.
03 Moses
Mosè
Italy · 1.1 km from Rome41.894° N 12.493° E
Luciano Tronati · CC BY-SA 4.0 The church itself is worth the visit. It was built in the 5th century to house the chains said to have bound Saint Peter, which are still kept in the church and give it its name, Saint Peter in Chains. Julius II, as Cardinal della Rovere, paid for a major rebuilding before he became pope. The Florentine sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo, who is thought to have added the twins to the Capitoline Wolf, is buried to the left of the entrance.
Did you know? Popular tradition holds that profiles of Julius II and of a woman are hidden in the beard beneath Moses' lower lip.
04 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay Those coins aren't just souvenirs of the ritual — city workers sweep or vacuum roughly €3,000 out of the basin every day, and the annual total, somewhere around €1.4 to €1.5 million, is handed over to the Catholic charity Caritas, which uses it to help fund a soup kitchen, a food bank and welfare programs across Rome. Every wish thrown away here is, in a very literal sense, paying for somebody else's dinner.
Did you know? Salvi is said to have placed a large stone vase on the right side to block a barber's sign he disliked; Romans call it the 'Ace of Cups'.
05 David
Italy · 0.8 km from Florence43.777° N 11.259° E
Image by twalmedia from Pixabay The statue stood outdoors for more than 350 years. Cracks appeared in its left leg in the mid-19th century, and in 1873 it was moved into the Galleria dell'Accademia; a replica has stood at the original spot on Piazza della Signoria since 1910. In 1991 a man attacked it with a hammer and broke off part of a toe, and in 2004 it received its first major cleaning since 1843. Cracks in the legs are still monitored. The Accademia, founded in 1784, also holds Michelangelo's four unfinished Prisoners, meant for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and his unfinished Saint Matthew, figures that show his method of freeing a form from the stone.
Did you know? Michelangelo was 26 when he signed the contract in August 1501, and he was given two years to finish.
06 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 Florence, cradle of the Italian Renaissance, gathers its civic heart around the Piazza della Signoria, where the Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi have served for centuries as an open-air gallery of sculpture.
Did you know? Apart from the sword, the whole group was cast in just three pieces: the body of Perseus, the body of Medusa and her severed head.
07 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
Estasi di santa Teresa d'Avila
Italy · 1.3 km from Rome41.905° N 12.494° E
Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0 That contrast is the point of the chapel. The coloured marble frame and the spectators belong to the visitor's world, while Teresa and the angel, in white stone and lit from above, float in a zone of their own. A small terracotta study for the group, still bearing marks of the sculptor's fingers, is now in the Hermitage.
Did you know? The Cornaro onlookers in the side boxes are all men of the family, including the cardinal himself and the Venetian Doge Giovanni I Cornaro.
08 Apollo and Daphne
Apollo e Dafne
Italy · 2 km from Rome41.914° N 12.492° E
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Galleria Borghese holds the other great early Bernini groups too — the Rape of Proserpina and David — displayed in the rooms for which many of them were made.
Did you know? The marble stands 243 cm high, making both figures roughly life-size.
09 The Rape of Proserpina
Ratto di Proserpina
Italy · 2 km from Rome41.914° N 12.492° E
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · CC BY-SA 4.0 The work was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Bernini's early patron, and was the first in the series of great Borghese sculptures that went on to include his David and Apollo and Daphne. In 1623, however, the cardinal gave it to Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of the new pope Gregory XV, possibly to win favour with a rival family. It stayed with the Ludovisi for nearly three centuries, standing for a time at the foot of the grand staircase of Palazzo Piombino, until the Italian state bought it in 1908 and returned it to the villa for which it was made. It now stands in the centre of the Salone degli Imperatori on a plain marble base carved in 1911.
Did you know? Its original pedestal carried a Latin couplet by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, written a few years before the statue was carved.
10 Farnese Hercules
Ercole Farnese
Italy · 1.4 km from Naples40.853° N 14.251° E
Rijksmuseum · CC0 In 1787 it moved to Naples with most of the Farnese collection and is now a centrepiece of the National Archaeological Museum (MANN), one of the great museums of the ancient world, which also holds the finest finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
11 Veiled Christ
Cristo velato
Italy · 1.3 km from Naples40.849° N 14.255° E
David Sivyer from United Kingdom · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Cappella Sansevero, properly the church of Santa Maria della Pietà , began in 1590 as a private chapel near the family palace, became the family tomb in 1613 and took its present form under Raimondo in the mid-18th century. Around the Christ stand Corradini's veiled Modesty of 1752 and Francesco Queirolo's Disinganno of 1753 to 1754, with its intricate marble net, beneath Francesco Maria Russo's ceiling fresco of 1749. The chapel lies close to the church of San Domenico Maggiore in the historic centre of Naples, a World Heritage Site since 1995 that still follows the street grid of the ancient Greek city.
Did you know? Sanmartino signed the work on the back of the pedestal, beneath the marble mattress, with his name, Naples and the year 1753.
12 Christ of the Abyss
Italy · 22.3 km from Genoa44.313° N 9.175° E
Lucianoro1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The idea outlived its original context. Divers still descend on the statue every August for a small underwater ceremony, and the same design — sometimes literal copies cast from Galletti's mould — has since been set up in Grenada and off Key Largo in Florida. San Fruttuoso's is the original, and the reason it sits at diving depth rather than on the shore above is the whole point: it was built for an audience that would have to hold its breath to see it.
Did you know? During that restoration a lost hand, probably knocked off by a ship's anchor, was recast and refitted.
13 Cretto di Burri
Italy37.788° N 12.971° E
Boobax · CC BY-SA 3.0 The result spreads over roughly eight hectares. The concrete blocks stand about one and a half metres high, and the fissures between them are two to three metres wide, so a visitor walks below eye level through a pale, silent maze. The motif was not new for Burri: for years he had painted smaller "cretti", surfaces of cracked paint and pigment, and here the same idea takes on the scale of a landscape. Some 350 metres away, the unburied ruins of the old town are still visible.
Did you know? The earthquake that destroyed Gibellina struck on 14 January 1968, leaving most of its families homeless.
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 sculptures in Italy?
- On our list, Trajan's Column ranks first, followed by Column of Marcus Aurelius and Moses.
- Where is Michelangelo's David today?
- The original David stands in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, where it was moved in 1873 to protect it from the weather. A full-size copy occupies its first position outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria.
- Who carved the Veiled Christ in Naples?
- The Veiled Christ was carved by the Neapolitan sculptor Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753. It lies in the Cappella Sansevero, the chapel of the princes of Sansevero in the historic centre of Naples.
- What is the Cretto di Burri?
- It is a land-art work by Alberto Burri that covers the ruins of old Gibellina, destroyed by the Belice earthquake of 1968, with blocks of white concrete. The channels between the blocks follow the lines of the town's former streets.
- How many sculptures are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 13 sculptures.