The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments Seen on Screen in Europe
13 places in 6 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in Europe are Place de la Concorde (France), Eiffel Tower (France) and Trevi Fountain (Italy). The list covers 13 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in 6 countries. France has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The squares and monuments of Europe have been film sets for as long as there has been film. A camera needs no explanation when it shows the Eiffel Tower or the Trevi Fountain: the place itself announces the city, the mood and often the century. Being seen on screen adds a second layer of memory to these places, so that a visitor arriving at the Spanish Steps may already remember a scene played there, and many come precisely to stand where the story happened.
Rome is the classic stage. Anita Ekberg's walk into the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita made it the most famous fountain in cinema, Audrey Hepburn sat on the Spanish Steps in Roman Holiday, and Saint Peter's Square, embraced by Bernini's colonnades, appears in films about the Vatican. Paris contributes the Eiffel Tower and the Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in the city, while Nantes' Passage Pommeraye, a 19th-century shopping arcade on several levels, appears in Jacques Demy's Lola.
The list ranges far beyond the capitals. Brussels' Grand-Place, London's Big Ben, and León Cathedral with its walls of stained glass are instantly recognisable on screen, and Seville's Royal Alcázar became the Water Gardens of Dorne in Game of Thrones. Mountains and cliffs have their own monuments: the Aiguille du Midi above Chamonix, reached by a cable car to a terrace facing Mont Blanc, and César Manrique's Mirador del Río on Lanzarote, a viewpoint built into a cliff above the strait facing La Graciosa.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Place de la Concorde | Square | France | |
| 2 | Eiffel Tower | Observation tower | France | ✓ |
| 3 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | Italy | |
| 4 | Aiguille du Midi | Scenic viewpoint | France | |
| 5 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | Italy | |
| 6 | Saint Peter's Square | Square | Vatican City | |
| 7 | Place des Vosges | Square | France | |
| 8 | Grand-Place | Square | Belgium | ✓ |
| 9 | León Cathedral | Cathedral | Spain | ✓ |
| 10 | Big Ben | Clock tower | United Kingdom | |
| 11 | Royal Alcázar of Seville | Palace | Spain | ✓ |
| 12 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 13 | Passage Pommeraye | Covered passageway | France |
01 Place de la Concorde
France · 2.5 km from Paris48.866° N 2.321° E
Image by westcoast_dave from Pixabay 6 hectares of open ground at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées, between the Tuileries Garden and the Seine. It began as a royal flattery. In 1748 the merchants of Paris commissioned an equestrian statue of Louis XV to celebrate his recovery from illness, and the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel laid out an octagonal square around it, finished by 1772 and ringed with a dry moat and balustrades.
02 Eiffel Tower
Tour Eiffel
France · 4.3 km from Paris48.858° N 2.294° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.
Did you know? According to a popular anecdote, Guy de Maupassant lunched at the tower daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
03 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay What feeds this fountain isn't ornamental plumbing — it's the working outflow of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct finished in 19 BC that has been delivering the same spring water to roughly this same spot for over two thousand years. The Roman legend behind the name says a young woman, a virgo, once led thirsty soldiers to the spring; whether or not that's true, the aqueduct itself is real and still functioning.
Did you know? About 26 metres high and 49 metres wide, the Trevi is often called the largest Baroque fountain in the world.
04 Aiguille du Midi
France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Aiguille du Midi is a 3,842-metre rock needle in the Mont Blanc massif, and one of the few places in the Alps where anyone can stand face to face with the high mountains without climbing. Its name means "needle of midday". From the summit the view takes in Mont Blanc to the south, a whole horizon of peaks and glaciers, and, straight down, the rooftops of Chamonix more than two and a half kilometres below.
Did you know? The rock needle was first climbed on 4 August 1818 by the Polish count Antoni Malczewski with Jean-Michel Balmat and five other guides.
05 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 Spanish Steps are Rome's great outdoor staircase, climbing a steep 29-metre slope from the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti on the shoulder of the Pincian Hill.
Did you know? Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck were filmed on the steps for Roman Holiday (1953), and they also appear in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
06 Saint Peter's Square
Piazza San Pietro
Vatican City · 2.1 km from Rome41.902° N 12.457° E
Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0 St. Peter's Square is the great forecourt of St. Peter's Basilica, and one of the most successful pieces of urban theatre ever made. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed it between 1667 and 1676 for Pope Alexander VII, with a simple brief: as many people as possible should be able to see the pope give his blessing, from the basilica facade or from a window of the Vatican Palace.
Did you know? Two marble discs marked "Centro del colonnato" lie between the obelisk and the fountains; from either one, the four rows of columns line up and appear as a single row.
07 Place des Vosges
France · 1 km from Paris48.856° N 2.366° E
Image by beanitwoman from Pixabay The Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris and still one of the most perfect: a square exactly 140 metres a side, closed on all four sides by houses of the same design, with a formal garden of lawns, gravel and clipped trees in the middle.
Did you know? The square stands on the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, where King Henri II was mortally wounded in the eye by a lance during a joust in 1559.
08 Grand-Place
Belgium · 2 km from Brussels50.847° N 4.353° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The Grand-Place, or Grote Markt in Dutch, is the central square of Brussels, and no other square in Europe is so completely enclosed by ornate buildings. It is a fully paved rectangle of about 68 by 110 m, surrounded on all sides by gilded guildhalls, a Gothic town hall and the neo-Gothic King's House.
Did you know? Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation, were burned at the stake on the square in 1523.
09 León Cathedral
Catedral de Santa María de Regla de León
Spain · 2.2 km from León42.599° N 5.567° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by TerapiasNaturales from Pixabay León's cathedral, Santa María de Regla, is the Spanish cathedral that went furthest in the Gothic dream of replacing walls with light. It has around 125 windows and about 1,800 square metres of stained glass, most of it made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest collections of medieval glass anywhere.
Did you know? For centuries a dried hide over a door was said to be a mole that wrecked the builders' work by night; in the 1990s it proved a leatherback turtle shell.
10 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.
Did you know? The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.
11 Royal Alcázar of Seville
Spain · 2.5 km from Seville37.384° N 5.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Danor from Pixabay The Royal Alcázar of Seville is a palace built as a sequence of courtyards, each opening into the next: arcades carved with lace-like plaster, tiled walls, pools and channels of water, and beyond them a maze of gardens full of orange trees and palms.
Did you know? Arabic inscriptions in Pedro I's palace refer to the Christian king as 'Sultan Don Bidru'.
12 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Mirador del Río is a viewpoint at the northern tip of Lanzarote that is almost invisible until you are inside it. César Manrique, the island's artist and architect, built it between 1971 and 1973 into the edge of the Famara cliffs at a spot called Batería del Río, about 475 metres above the sea, and clad it in rough volcanic stone so that from the outside it reads as part of the rock.
Did you know? A sculpture of a bird and a fish greets visitors at the entrance, introducing the twin themes of air and sea.
13 Passage Pommeraye
France · 2.3 km from Nantes47.213° N 1.560° W
Julien Thibault · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nantes built its fortune on the Atlantic trade, and in the early 1840s the property developer Louis Pommeraye gambled on giving the city's merchants something Paris already had: a glass-roofed shopping arcade. The difficulty was the site. Between rue de la Fosse, down near the old port quarter, and rue Santeuil on the slope towards Place Graslin, the ground drops by more than nine metres.
Did you know? Jacques Demy filmed here three times, including a brief scene of about 25 seconds in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
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 seen on screen in Europe?
- On our list, Place de la Concorde (France) ranks first, followed by Eiffel Tower (France) and Trevi Fountain (Italy).
- Which country has the most squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from France (5), Spain (3) and Italy (2).
- Which film made the Trevi Fountain famous?
- Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), in which Anita Ekberg wades into the fountain at night, made it one of the most famous scenes in cinema. The fountain had already appeared in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954).
- Is Big Ben the name of the tower?
- Strictly, Big Ben is the nickname of the great bell inside the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster. The tower itself was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012, though the name Big Ben is commonly used for the whole structure.
- Which film is set on the Spanish Steps?
- In Roman Holiday (1953), Audrey Hepburn's princess eats a gelato on the Spanish Steps while talking to Gregory Peck. The film was shot on location across Rome.
- How many squares, streets and monuments seen on screen are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 13 squares, streets and monuments seen on screen in 6 countries. France has the most, with 5.