The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Italy
22 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in Italy are Castel Sant'Angelo, Trajan's Column and Arch of Constantine. The list covers 22 squares, streets and monuments. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italian cities treat the street as a work of art. Rome built triumphal arches and columns to imperial victories, medieval communes like Siena and Pisa shaped civic squares around the town hall and cathedral, Baroque popes added fountains and staircases, and the newly unified kingdom of the 19th century roofed whole streets in glass and iron. Most of it is still in daily use.
In Rome, Castel Sant'Angelo rose as Hadrian's mausoleum before it became a papal fortress, Trajan's Column spirals a frieze of the Dacian Wars up its marble drum, and the Arch of Constantine celebrates the victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 with reliefs taken from earlier monuments. Piazza Navona follows the oval of an ancient stadium, the Trevi Fountain, finished in 1762, pours Neptune's water across a palace façade, and the Spanish Steps climb to the church of Trinità dei Monti. The Vittoriano, in white Botticino marble, honours the first king of united Italy and holds the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Beyond the capital, Pisa's Piazza del Duomo sets the cathedral, baptistery and leaning bell tower on a lawn, and Siena's shell-shaped Piazza del Campo slopes toward the Palazzo Pubblico and hosts the Palio twice each summer. In Venice the clock tower on St Mark's Square has two bronze figures that strike its bell, and Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and Naples's Galleria Umberto I cover crossing streets with glass domes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Castel Sant'Angelo | Castle | |
| 2 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | |
| 3 | Arch of Constantine | Triumphal arch | |
| 4 | Piazza Navona | Square | |
| 5 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | |
| 6 | Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel II Monument), Rome | Monument | |
| 7 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | |
| 8 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | |
| 9 | Piazza del Duomo, Pisa | Square | ✓ |
| 10 | Piazza del Campo | Square | ✓ |
| 11 | Galleria Umberto I | Covered passageway | |
| 12 | St Mark's Clocktower | Clock tower | |
| 13 | Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II | Covered passageway | |
| 14 | Scala Sancta | Stairs | ✓ |
| 15 | Piazza del Campidoglio | Square | |
| 16 | Via Garibaldi, Genoa | Pedestrian street | |
| 17 | Piazza dell'Anfiteatro | Square | |
| 18 | Piazzale Michelangelo | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 19 | Scala Contarini del Bovolo | Stairs | |
| 20 | Portico di San Luca | Covered passageway | |
| 21 | Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone | Stairs | |
| 22 | Piazza della Signoria | Square |
01 Castel Sant'Angelo
Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E
Image by rainhard2 from Pixabay Its current name comes from a specific legend: in 590 CE, during a plague, Pope Gregory the Great is said to have seen the Archangel Michael appear on the summit sheathing his sword — read as a sign the epidemic was ending. A statue of the angel has stood on top ever since, and the building has cycled through duty as papal residence, state prison, and now museum, on top of its original job as a tomb.
Did you know? When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, looters scattered the imperial urns and their ashes.
02 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the column unique is the frieze: a single band of relief about 190 m long that winds 23 times around the shaft, carrying 155 scenes and more than 2,600 figures. The lower half tells the first war, the upper half the second, separated by a winged Victory writing on a shield. Surprisingly little of it is battle.
Did you know? Of the 224 trees carved on the frieze, 48 are shown being chopped down, an image scholars read as a symbol of conquest.
03 Arch of Constantine
Arco di Costantino
Italy · 1.2 km from Rome41.890° N 12.491° E
Image by TreptowerAlex from Pixabay The arch is a collage. Much of its sculpture was taken from earlier monuments to three of the best-remembered emperors of the 2nd century: Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Their faces were recut as Constantine's.
Did you know? In 1534 Lorenzino de' Medici hacked heads off some of the arch's statues, and the scandal got him expelled from Rome.
04 Piazza Navona
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.899° N 12.473° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 The square as we see it is the work of one papacy. Innocent X, whose family palace faced the arena, turned it into a Baroque showpiece in the mid-seventeenth century. At the centre rises Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers of 1651, crowned by the Obelisk of Domitian, which was brought over in pieces from the Circus of Maxentius.
Did you know? Bernini's four river gods stand for the Nile, Danube, Ganges and Río de la Plata, the continents reached by papal authority.
05 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 The relief spirals 21 times around the shaft. It begins with the army crossing the Danube and then follows the campaigns in scene after scene. Compared with Trajan's Column, the carving is cut deeper, with more drilling and stronger contrasts of light and shadow, and the heads are enlarged so that expressions can be read from below.
06 Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel II Monument), Rome
Vittoriano
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.895° N 12.483° E
Image by serghei_topor from Pixabay Sacconi drew on Hellenistic sanctuaries such as the Altar of Pergamon, and the monument works like a sequence of ascending platforms. At its centre, the bronze equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II by Enrico Chiaradia rides above the Altare della Patria, the Altar of the Fatherland, where the goddess Roma, carved by Angelo Zanelli stands at the heart of the composition.
Did you know? Clearing the site meant demolishing the Aracoeli convent along with the sixteenth-century Tower of Paul III.
07 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay The fountain as you see it today took decades longer than expected to build. Pope Clement XII opened a design competition in 1730; Nicola Salvi won it, broke ground in 1732, and died in 1751 before the work was done — it was finally finished by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762.
Did you know? The colossal central figure of Oceanus was carved by Pietro Bracci.
08 Spanish Steps
Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti
Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.906° N 12.483° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The staircase takes the idea of terraced garden steps and inflates it to the scale of a city. More than 130 travertine steps split, curve, gather on landings and divide again, so that the view changes at every turn and the church at the top seems to grow as you approach.
Did you know? The divided, symmetrical flights borrow from Bramante's stairs for the Belvedere Courtyard and Michelangelo's shaped steps in the Laurentian Library vestibule.
09 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 The cathedral came first, begun in 1064 to designs by the architect Buscheto, whose tomb is set into the facade. Its front is layered with open arcaded galleries, and worshippers have traditionally entered not through the main doors but through the Porta di San Ranieri facing the tower, whose bronze panels Bonanno Pisano made around 1180.
Did you know? Cimabue's head of Saint John in the apse mosaic was his last known work before his death in Pisa.
10 Piazza del Campo
Italy · 1.5 km from Siena43.318° N 11.331° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zotx from Pixabay The square grew from an open space on a slope where the three hill communities that merged to form Siena met. It served as market, meeting place and arena long before it was formalised. Medieval Siena was a rich, self-governing city-state and Florence's great rival, and its government made the Campo a statement of civic pride.
Did you know? The tower is said to have been built to the same height as Siena Cathedral, a sign that civic and church power stood as equals.
11 Galleria Umberto I
Italy · 0.7 km from Naples40.838° N 14.249° E
Miguel Hermoso Cuesta · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building belongs to the Risanamento, the vast rebuilding of central Naples that followed the cholera epidemic of 1884. The site had been occupied by six-storey tenements in poor repair, with bad sanitation and taverns of dubious reputation; the new gallery was meant to replace them with light, air and a modern mix of shops, cafés and social life, with apartments on the upper floor.
Did you know? Demolition of the old tenements began on 1 May 1887, barely six months before the foundation stone was laid.
12 St Mark's Clocktower
Torre dell'orologio
Italy · 0.5 km from Venice45.435° N 12.339° E
kallerna · CC BY-SA 4.0 Read the facade from the top down. On the roof terrace two huge bronze figures, one old and one young, swing from the waist to strike the hours on a bell cast at the Arsenal in 1497; they are known as the Moors because of the dark patina of the bronze, and were cast in 1494.
Did you know? In the 1750s Bartolomeo Ferracina replaced the clock's medieval foliot escapement with a more accurate pendulum.
13 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.466° N 9.190° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The engineering is the spectacle. 5 metres, rising 17 metres above the octagon — a considerable feat for its time. Beneath it, the floor of the octagon is laid with mosaics of the coats of arms of the capitals of the young Kingdom of Italy. The monumental triumphal arch facing the cathedral was the last element Mengoni worked on: he died on 30 December 1877 after falling from scaffolding there, just days before the Galleria was officially opened.
Did you know? The design took three competitions; the first drew so many entries that 176 were put on display at the Brera gallery, yet no winner was chosen.
14 Scala Sancta
Scala Santa
Italy · 2.4 km from Rome41.887° N 12.507° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Miguel Hermoso Cuesta · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rule has not changed in centuries: the central staircase may only be climbed on the knees, usually with a prayer on each step, while four ordinary staircases on either side are for walking. Martin Luther went up on his knees in 1510 and later said he reached the top doubting whether it did any good. Charles Dickens watched the devotion in 1845 and disliked what he saw.
15 Piazza del Campidoglio
Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.893° N 12.483° E
Image by patrizio1948 from Pixabay The approach is part of the effect. The Cordonata, a broad stepped ramp of Michelangelo's design, climbs gently from the street, and at its top the colossal ancient figures of Castor and Pollux stand beside their horses, flanked by the so-called Trophies of Marius and the first milestone of the Appian Way.
Did you know? The Cordonata was made broad and shallow enough for riders to reach the square on horseback without dismounting.
16 Via Garibaldi, Genoa
Via Giuseppe Garibaldi
Italy · 0.3 km from Genoa44.411° N 8.933° E
Alex2015Genova · CC BY-SA 4.0 The street was the product of Genoa's golden age. In the second half of the 16th century and the early 17th, the city's noble families grew immensely rich as bankers to the Spanish Crown, financing among much else the army Spain kept in Flanders.
Did you know? Palazzo Doria Tursi swallowed three of the original building plots, has housed the city government since 1848, and was once wrongly credited to Michelangelo.
17 Piazza dell'Anfiteatro
Italy · 16.3 km from Pisa43.845° N 10.506° E
Kasa Fue · CC BY-SA 4.0 The amphitheatre was built in the Roman town of Luca, generally dated to the second century AD; at its height it is said to have held some 10,000 spectators on around eighteen tiers of seats. After antiquity its masonry was not demolished but absorbed: houses, storerooms, a salt depot, a powder magazine and a prison were gradually wedged into the arena and built against the old arcades.
Did you know? The amphitheatre was built outside the Roman town walls, next to the north gate, rather than in the heart of the city.
18 Piazzale Michelangelo
Italy · 2.3 km from Florence43.763° N 11.265° E
Michael Wittwer · CC BY-SA 4.0 The terrace is not an old belvedere but a piece of nineteenth-century city planning. In the years when Florence was briefly the capital of the newly united Italy, the city set about a sweeping programme of renewal, and the architect Giuseppe Poggi laid out the Viale dei Colli, a tree-lined avenue of some eight kilometres winding up through the hills south of the river.
Did you know? More than two thousand iris varieties grow on the garden's slopes, including a large collection of historic irises donated from the Presby Memorial Garden in New Jersey.
19 Scala Contarini del Bovolo
Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo
Italy · 0.4 km from Venice45.435° N 12.335° E
Didier Descouens · CC BY-SA 4.0 The palace itself dates from the fifteenth century, a city residence for a branch of the Contarini, one of the oldest patrician families of the Republic. The stair came later, in 1499, when brothers of the family commissioned it to dress up the facade overlooking a small courtyard. It is usually credited to Giovanni Candi, though some sources give the design to Giorgio Spavento.
Did you know? In 1852 the palace was bequeathed to the parish of San Luca and became the seat of a charitable congregation.
20 Portico di San Luca
Italy · 1.4 km from Bologna44.491° N 11.329° E
BARBARA ZOLI · CC BY-SA 4.0 The arcade was built to protect the annual procession in which a venerated icon of the Virgin is carried down from the sanctuary into Bologna. Local tradition holds that the image was painted by Saint Luke and brought from Constantinople in the 12th century by a pilgrim.
Did you know? Before the arcade existed, pilgrims hung pictures of the mysteries of the Rosary on the trees lining the road, which had been paved by the city in 1589.
21 Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone
Scalinata di Santa Maria del Monte
Italy · 39.4 km from Ragusa37.239° N 14.512° E
No machine-readable author provided. Gmelfi assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Since 1954 every riser has been faced with hand-painted majolica tiles — the detail that turns a steep civic staircase into a work of art. The tiles form a small history of Sicilian ceramics read from bottom to top, with motifs arranged by period — from patterns in the Arab tradition up to contemporary designs — so the climb becomes a walk through time. One step, the 103rd, bears a reference to the 103rd Psalm.
Did you know? The first steps were cantilevered and less steep; in 1844 the architect Salvatore Marino joined the separate flights into one.
More about Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone →
22 Piazza della Signoria
Italy · 1.2 km from Florence43.770° N 11.256° E
Image by JobiWan from Pixabay The square is ruled by the Palazzo Vecchio, the massive, crenellated Romanesque fortress-palace that served as the town hall and seat of government. Beside it opens the Loggia dei Lanzi, a set of wide arches on Corinthian capitals that has become one of the finest open-air sculpture galleries anywhere.
Did you know? One of the Medici lions in the Loggia dei Lanzi is a reworked 2nd-century Roman sculpture; its partner was carved by Flaminio Vacca in 1598.
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 squares, streets and monuments in Italy?
- On our list, Castel Sant'Angelo ranks first, followed by Trajan's Column and Arch of Constantine.
- Why do people throw coins into the Trevi Fountain?
- Tradition holds that a coin thrown over the shoulder into the fountain ensures a return to Rome. The coins collected are given to charity.
- What is the Palio di Siena?
- A bareback horse race run around the Piazza del Campo on 2 July and 16 August, contested by riders representing the city's contrade, or districts. It dates back to the Middle Ages.
- Why does the Arch of Constantine reuse older sculptures?
- Much of its relief decoration was taken from monuments of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, with the emperors' heads reworked. Builders of the 4th century used these spolia to link Constantine with the celebrated rulers of the past.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 22 squares, streets and monuments.