The Most Beautiful Squares in Italy
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares in Italy are Piazza Navona, Piazza del Duomo, Pisa and Piazza del Campo. The list covers 6 squares. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The Italian piazza grew out of the Roman forum and the rivalries of medieval city-states, and it remains the heart of Italian towns. Communes built their town halls and cathedrals around open squares to show civic pride; popes and Renaissance princes reshaped them as stages for architecture and sculpture; and in many towns the outline of a Roman stadium or amphitheatre still determines the shape of the square laid over it. Nowhere else do squares carry so much history in their very form.
Piazza Navona in Rome follows the long oval of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, with Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers at its centre facing Borromini's church of Sant'Agnese in Agone. On the Capitoline Hill, Michelangelo redesigned the Piazza del Campidoglio around a star-patterned oval pavement, framed by three palaces. In Florence, the Piazza della Signoria is dominated by the Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi, filled with Renaissance sculpture.
Tuscany holds three more. The Piazza del Campo in Siena slopes like a shell towards the Palazzo Pubblico, its brick paving divided into nine sections, and it is the course of the Palio horse race. In Pisa, the Piazza del Duomo sets the cathedral, baptistery, leaning bell tower and monumental cemetery in white marble on a wide green lawn. And the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro in Lucca is an oval of houses built on the foundations of a Roman amphitheatre, entered through low arches.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Piazza Navona | Square | |
| 2 | Piazza del Duomo, Pisa | Square | ✓ |
| 3 | Piazza del Campo | Square | ✓ |
| 4 | Piazza del Campidoglio | Square | |
| 5 | Piazza dell'Anfiteatro | Square | |
| 6 | Piazza della Signoria | Square |
01 Piazza Navona
Italy · 0.7 km from Rome41.899° N 12.473° E
Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0 Come early in the morning, when the fountains can be heard and the light slides along the curved east side, or at dusk when the ochre and rose façades glow.
Did you know? In 217 AD, after fire damaged the Colosseum, the stadium briefly hosted gladiator fights for a few years.
02 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 Along the north side runs the Camposanto, a long Gothic cloister begun in 1278 around soil said to have been brought from Golgotha after the Third Crusade. Its fresco cycles, including the Triumph of Death, were all but destroyed when Allied incendiary bombs set the roof on fire in July 1944, and restoration has continued since 1945. The preparatory drawings revealed in the process are shown in the Sinopie Museum in the old hospital on the south side of the square.
Did you know? The tower's seven main bells span six centuries, the oldest cast in 1262 and the heaviest, L'Assunta, weighing about 3,620 kg.
03 Piazza del Campo
Italy · 1.5 km from Siena43.318° N 11.331° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zotx from Pixabay At the upper edge of the square stands the Fonte Gaia, the "joyful fountain", the end point of a network of underground conduits that brought water into the city. Jacopo della Quercia carved its marble reliefs of the Madonna and the Virtues in the early 15th century; the originals are now preserved in the Santa Maria della Scala complex, and copies by Tito Sarrocchi have stood in the square since 1866. Twice a year, on 2 July and 16 August, the Campo is covered with a layer of earth for the Palio, the bareback horse race between Siena's contrade, or city wards: ten horses run three laps of the square, and the race is usually over in about 90 seconds.
Did you know? The Palio's prize is the drappellone, a hand-painted silk banner commissioned from a different artist for each race.
04 Piazza del Campidoglio
Italy · 0.5 km from Rome41.893° N 12.483° E
Image by patrizio1948 from Pixabay In the middle stands the bronze Marcus Aurelius on horseback, one of only two bronze statues of a pagan Roman emperor to survive; it escaped the melting pot that claimed more than twenty others because for centuries it was taken for Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Michelangelo brought it here from the Lateran; the original is now kept indoors in the museums and a copy stands in its place. Around its pedestal spreads the pavement Michelangelo drew but no one built for four centuries — an oval with a twelve-pointed star of interlacing curves, laid out only in 1940 by Antonio Muñoz.
Did you know? The Palazzo dei Conservatori sits on the foundations of the ancient Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, parts of whose podium can still be seen in the museums.
05 Piazza dell'Anfiteatro
Italy · 16.3 km from Pisa43.845° N 10.506° E
Kasa Fue · CC BY-SA 4.0 The square as it looks today is a work of the nineteenth century. Around 1830 the Lucchese architect Lorenzo Nottolini cleared the small buildings crowding the interior, opened a street that follows the outer curve of the ellipse, and turned the recovered oval into the city's food market, which remained there until the first half of the twentieth century. Lucca itself, a Roman colony from 180 BC and later a prosperous silk-trading republic, is best known for the complete ring of Renaissance walls that still encloses its old town, now a tree-lined promenade, and for being the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini.
Did you know? The lower pillars were faced with plain brick, while the upper ones alternated white limestone blocks with bands of brick.
06 Piazza della Signoria
Italy · 1.2 km from Florence43.770° N 11.256° E
Image by JobiWan from Pixabay The paving has seen history as well as art. In 1497 the friar Girolamo Savonarola held his Bonfire of the Vanities here, burning mirrors, books and paintings; on 23 May 1498 he was himself executed on the same spot, now marked by a round plaque set into the ground near the fountain. Today the square is pedestrianised, and the best way to take it in is slowly, at different hours, as the light moves across the stone of the palazzo.
Did you know? After the Ghibelline houses were demolished in 1268, the square stayed rough and potholed until it was paved for the first time in 1385.
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 in Italy?
- On our list, Piazza Navona ranks first, followed by Piazza del Duomo, Pisa and Piazza del Campo.
- Why is Piazza Navona oval?
- It follows the shape of the Stadium of Domitian, built in the first century AD for athletic contests. Later buildings were raised on the stadium's seating, preserving its outline in the square.
- Why is Piazza del Campo shaped like a shell?
- The square fills a natural hollow where several hills meet. Its paving is divided into nine sections, commonly linked to the Council of Nine that governed Siena when the square was laid out in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
- Who designed the Piazza del Campidoglio?
- Michelangelo, who was commissioned by Pope Paul III in the 1530s to redesign the Capitoline Hill. His geometric pavement was only completed in 1940, following his original design.
- How many squares are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 6 squares.