The Most Mystical Places in Italy
25 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical places in Italy are Su Nuraxi di Barumini, Craco and Rock Drawings in Valcamonica. The list covers 25 mystical places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Italy's mystical side lies far from its famous piazzas. Sardinia's Bronze Age people left thousands of stone towers whose rituals are only half understood; in the Alps and in Sicily, prehistoric communities carved rock and cut tombs into cliffs; and southern Italy developed a deep, intimate relationship with the dead, from underground burial galleries to ossuaries tended by the living. Steep, unstable hills added the haunting sight of whole villages left to the wind.
Su Nuraxi di Barumini, Nuraghe Santu Antine and Nuraghe Is Paras show the Nuragic civilization at its most monumental, with corbelled stone chambers rising into dark, beehive-like vaults. In Valcamonica, tens of thousands of figures were engraved into glacier-smoothed rock over millennia, and in Sicily the Necropolis of Pantalica honeycombs the limestone walls of a gorge with rock-cut tombs from the Bronze and Iron Ages.
The dead are close in the south. In Palermo, the Capuchin Catacombs hold rows of mummified and clothed bodies, while in Naples the Catacombs of San Gennaro preserve early Christian frescoes and the Fontanelle cemetery fills a tuff cavern with skulls once adopted and cared for by local people. Craco and Pentedattilo, the latter clinging to a five-fingered rock in Calabria, are villages left empty on their crags. Faith supplies the rest: Santa Maria dell'Isola rises on its rock above the sea at Tropea, and the Madonna della Corona sanctuary is built into a sheer cliff above the Adige valley.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Su Nuraxi di Barumini | Nuraghe | ✓ |
| 2 | Craco | Abandoned village | |
| 3 | Rock Drawings in Valcamonica | Petroglyph | |
| 4 | Necropolis of Pantalica | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 5 | Catacombe dei Cappuccini | Catacombs | |
| 6 | Catacomb of Priscilla | Catacombs | |
| 7 | Necropolis of Monterozzi | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 8 | Santa Maria dell'Isola Monastery | Pilgrimage site | |
| 9 | Sanctuary of Oropa | Pilgrimage site | |
| 10 | Nuraghe Is Paras | Nuraghe | |
| 11 | Catacombs of San Gennaro | Catacombs | |
| 12 | Pentedattilo | Abandoned village | |
| 13 | Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua | Pilgrimage site | |
| 14 | Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter | Catacombs | |
| 15 | Nuraghe Santu Antine | Nuraghe | |
| 16 | Catacombs of Domitilla | Catacombs | |
| 17 | Madonna della Corona Sanctuary (Spiazzi) | Pilgrimage site | |
| 18 | Baia | Abandoned village | |
| 19 | Fontanelle cemetery | Catacombs | |
| 20 | Nuraghe Arrubiu | Nuraghe | |
| 21 | Necropolis Banditaccia | Necropolis | |
| 22 | Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Mondovi | Pilgrimage site | |
| 23 | Nuraghe Losa | Nuraghe | |
| 24 | Capuchin Crypt | Catacombs | |
| 25 | Crypt of the Original Sin | Rock-cut church |
01 Su Nuraxi di Barumini
Area archeologica di Su Nuraxi
Italy39.703° N 9.000° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Norbert Nagel · CC BY-SA 3.0 Sardinia is dotted with nuraghi, the stone towers of the Bronze Age Nuragic civilization, and Su Nuraxi at Barumini is the most complete of them. The name simply means "the nuraghe" in Campidanese Sardinian. Scholars regard it as the most impressive expression of that civilization, and it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997.
Did you know? Until 1949 the whole complex lay buried under earth and looked like just another low hill, until torrential rains washed soil away and exposed its stones.
02 Craco
Italy40.379° N 16.440° E
Maurizio Moro5153 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Craco is a medieval hill town in Basilicata that its people had to leave. Its houses cling to a steep crest about 400 metres high above the valley of the Cavone, around a square Norman tower that dominates the skyline; below and around it spread the calanchi, bare grey badlands carved by erosion. Few places in Italy look so much like a stage set, which is exactly why film directors keep coming back.
Did you know? Greek settlers are believed to have lived on the site from around 540 BC.
03 Rock Drawings in Valcamonica
Incisioni rupestri della Val Camonica
Italy46.024° N 10.350° E
Luca Giarelli · CC BY-SA 3.0 Valcamonica, the long valley of the river Oglio in the Lombard Alps, holds one of the largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the world. When it was inscribed in 1979 it became Italy's first World Heritage Site, with more than 140,000 figures recognised; continued survey has since pushed the catalogue to somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 engravings.
Did you know? Most of the engravings were made by pecking: a hammer-like stone or metal tool struck rows of tiny round pits into the rock surface.
04 Necropolis of Pantalica
Pantalica
Italy · 28.1 km from Syracuse37.133° N 14.983° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Danny Krull · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the limestone gorges of southeastern Sicily, thousands of small rectangular openings honeycomb the cliffs like the cells of a vast hive. Each is the mouth of a tomb cut into the rock between roughly the thirteenth and the seventh centuries BC.
Did you know? No trace survives of the prehistoric houses; Paolo Orsi argued the people lived in light huts of wood, reeds and straw that weather simply erased.
05 Catacombe dei Cappuccini
Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.112° N 13.339° E
Giacomo Palermo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the Capuchin friary in Palermo lies one of Europe's most unsettling burial places: corridors lined with the dressed, dried and upright bodies of Palermitans who died between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Did you know? Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, the first friar laid here on 16 October 1599, still lies first on the left after the entrance.
06 Catacomb of Priscilla
Catacombe di Priscilla
Italy · 4.2 km from Rome41.930° N 12.509° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain Beneath the Via Salaria, on the northern side of Rome, lies one of the richest of the city's early Christian cemeteries. The Catacomb of Priscilla was dug from an ancient quarry and grew into many kilometres of galleries on two levels, used for burials from the late second century into the fourth.
07 Necropolis of Monterozzi
Necropoli dei Monterozzi
Italy · 16.8 km from Civitavecchia42.250° N 11.770° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gsimonov · Public domain On a long limestone ridge east of Tarquinia, the Etruscans buried their dead for the better part of a thousand years. Around 6,000 graves have been identified on the Monterozzi hill, from Villanovan cremations of the Iron Age to burials of the Roman period, and in the nineteenth century some six hundred earth mounds still broke the skyline.
08 Santa Maria dell'Isola Monastery
Santuario di Santa Maria dell'Isola
Italy · 17.9 km from Vibo Valentia38.680° N 15.896° E
Walter Della Schiava · CC BY-SA 3.0 Below the cliff-top old town of Tropea, on Calabria's Tyrrhenian coast, a small church crowns a sandstone rock that was once entirely surrounded by the sea, which is why the place is still called the island. The pale facade, the central bell tower and the pinnacles stand against open water and sky, and a stairway cut into the rock around 1810 climbs from the beach to the church door.
Did you know? Tradition holds that Eastern monks first settled the rock as a hermit community dedicated to Saint Menas, long before it became a Marian church.
09 Sanctuary of Oropa
Santuario di Oropa
Italy45.628° N 7.979° E
Alfiere33 · CC BY-SA 4.0 High in a natural amphitheatre of the Biellese Alps, at roughly 1,160 metres, the Sanctuary of Oropa is less a single church than a small mountain town built for the Virgin. Two basilicas, arcaded courtyards, former royal apartments and long pilgrim wings climb the slope in stages, and the whole ensemble is crowned by a great domed church that can be seen from the plain around Biella.
Did you know? The Sacro Monte di Oropa is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Sacred Mountains of Piedmont and Lombardy.
10 Nuraghe Is Paras
Italy39.749° N 9.107° E
Cristiano Cani · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Is Paras stands on the edge of Isili, in the Sarcidano uplands of central Sardinia, and from the outside it gives little away: a pale, compact mass of limestone on a rise looking west over open country. Its fame lies inside. 5 metres across.
Did you know? When its dome was raised in the 15th–14th century BC it may have been the tallest in the world, outdone only later by the Treasury of Atreus.
11 Catacombs of San Gennaro
Catacombe di San Gennaro
Italy · 2.5 km from Naples40.864° N 14.248° E
Dominik Matus · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the slope that climbs from the Sanità district to Capodimonte in northern Naples lies the largest Christian catacomb complex in southern Italy. Unlike the narrow galleries of Rome, the Catacombs of San Gennaro were cut into soft tuff on two levels with broad, high passages, and even whole churches were carved out of the rock.
Did you know? The catacombs lie beneath the Sanità district, a valley long nicknamed the Valley of the Dead for its many burial grounds.
12 Pentedattilo
Italy · 20.7 km from Reggio Calabria37.954° N 15.761° E
Codas · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few abandoned villages have a setting as strange as Pentedattilo's. Its houses cling to the foot of a single massive outcrop on Monte Calvario, in the hills behind the southern tip of Calabria, and the rock above them splits into a row of thick stone towers that look uncannily like the fingers of a giant hand raised against the sky. The name says as much: pente and daktylos, "five fingers" in Greek.
Did you know? According to tradition, the settlement began as a colony of the Greek city of Chalcis in 640 BC.
13 Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua
Basilica di Sant'Antonio di Padova
Italy · 34.3 km from Venice45.401° N 11.881° E
Image by sferrario1968 from Pixabay Padua calls it simply "il Santo", and the basilica built over the tomb of St Anthony is one of the great pilgrimage churches of Europe. Its skyline is unforgettable and unlike anything else in Italy: a cluster of domes, raised high on drums in the manner of St Mark's in Venice, crowd together above a brick body of gables, buttresses and slender belfries that recall minarets.
14 Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter
Catacombe dei Santi Marcellino e Pietro
Italy · 6 km from Rome41.879° N 12.549° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain The Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter lie beneath the Via Casilina, at the third mile of the ancient Via Labicana, and together with the imperial mausoleum above them form one of the richest ensembles of early Christian Rome. 5 km of passages on several levels.
15 Nuraghe Santu Antine
Italy · 31.9 km from Sassari40.487° N 8.770° E
This illustration was made by ( User:Royonx ) and released under the license(s) stated above. You are free to use it for any purpose as long as you credit me and follow the terms of the license. Example : © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons If you use this image outside of the Wikimedia projects, I would be happy to hear from you par courriel ( royonx gmail.com). Thanks ! Ce message en français · CC BY-SA 3.0 Santu Antine rises out of the Cabu Abbas plain in the Meilogu district of northern Sardinia, a dark mass of basalt blocks laid without mortar some three and a half thousand years ago. Sardinians have long called it sa domo de su re, "the house of the king", and the name fits: of the thousands of nuraghi scattered across the island, few match it for scale or for the finesse of its engineering.
Did you know? The name Santu Antine is the Sardinian form of Saint Constantine, the Roman emperor who legalised Christianity in the 4th century.
16 Catacombs of Domitilla
Catacombe di Domitilla
Italy · 4.8 km from Rome41.859° N 12.506° E
Anonymous Unknown author · Public domain Beneath the fields and lanes south of Rome's ancient walls, the volcanic tuff is threaded with one of the largest underground cemeteries of the early Church.
Did you know? The Catacombs of Domitilla are among the largest underground cemeteries in Rome, with galleries on four levels.
17 Madonna della Corona Sanctuary (Spiazzi)
Santuario della Madonna della Corona
Italy · 25.5 km from Verona45.650° N 10.856° E
Misasar · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Crown, the Madonna della Corona, seems to hang in mid-air. It is built into a sheer limestone wall on the eastern flank of Monte Baldo, at 774 metres, with a vertical drop below it to the valley of the Adige and an overhang of rock above it like a lid, so that from a distance the white church looks wedged into a crack of the mountain.
Did you know? The traditional pilgrim path from Brentino in the valley climbs more than 1,500 steps to reach the sanctuary.
18 Baia
Italy · 14.9 km from Naples40.817° N 14.070° E
Joseph Meyer · Public domain Two thousand years ago the shore of Baia was the most fashionable stretch of coast in the Roman world. From the first century BC the senatorial elite and then the emperors built seaside villas, terraced gardens and lavish bath halls here, on the inner slope of an old volcanic crater in the Phlegraean Fields west of Naples.
Did you know? Ancient tradition named Baiae after Baius, the helmsman of Odysseus, said to be buried on this coast.
19 Fontanelle cemetery
Cimitero delle Fontanelle
Italy · 1.8 km from Naples40.858° N 14.239° E
Lalupa · CC BY-SA 3.0 Rows of skulls, many thousands of them, line the galleries of a former tuff quarry cut into the hillside of Materdei, at the western end of the Sanità valley in Naples.
Did you know? According to legend, the skull called the Captain has one blackened eye socket and avenged insults by appearing at the offenders' weddings.
20 Nuraghe Arrubiu
Italy39.662° N 9.298° E
Hpschaefer · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Arrubiu is the Bronze Age at its most ambitious. Built around 1500 BC on the basalt plateau of Pranemuru above the valley of the Flumendosa, it is the only known nuraghe with a five-lobed plan: a central keep ringed by a bastion of five towers, which is in turn wrapped by an outer wall with seven more towers enclosing three courtyards.
Did you know? Arrubiu is described as the largest and most complex nuraghe in Sardinia, its whole complex covering more than 5,000 square metres.
21 Necropolis Banditaccia
Necropoli della Banditaccia
Italy · 26.9 km from Civitavecchia42.006° N 12.100° E
Sailko · CC BY 3.0 Outside the hill town of Cerveteri, the ancient Etruscan city of Caere laid out a second city for its dead, and the Banditaccia is what remains of it. Great round tumuli of tuff, capped with grass, sit along streets cut into the soft volcanic rock, with rows of smaller square tombs lined up between them like terraced houses.
Did you know? The Tomb of the Reliefs is unique among Etruscan tombs: instead of the usual wall paintings, its chamber is decorated with painted stucco reliefs.
22 Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Mondovi
Santuario di Vicoforte
Italy44.363° N 7.863° E
Mattis · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Sanctuary of Vicoforte, near Mondovì in Piedmont, is crowned by the largest elliptical dome in the world: an oval shell about 37 metres long and 25 metres wide on its axes, rising to some 74 metres above the floor. Inside, the whole vault is covered with a single continuous fresco cycle of more than six thousand square metres, so that standing beneath it one looks up into an unbroken painted sky.
Did you know? When the elliptical dome was finished, Francesco Gallo is said to have removed the scaffolding himself, because nobody else believed it would stand.
23 Nuraghe Losa
Italy40.116° N 8.793° E
Hans Hillewaert · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Losa rises out of the flat basalt plateau near Abbasanta, in west-central Sardinia, as a compact mass of dark, rough-hewn blocks. It belongs to the nuraghi — the Bronze Age stone towers that are the signature of the island's prehistory — and is one of the most complete and legible of them.
Did you know? The whole complex, village included, is ringed by a roughly elliptical outer wall measuring about 172 by 268 metres.
24 Capuchin Crypt
Italy · 1 km from Rome41.905° N 12.489° E
Anil Öztas · CC BY 4.0 Beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, a few steps from Piazza Barberini, a narrow corridor runs past a row of small chapels whose walls, vaults and lamps are made entirely of human bones. Skulls are stacked into arches and niches, while pelvises, leg bones and smaller bones are worked into patterns that cover the walls and ceilings.
Did you know? The bone decoration is credited to a friar, Father Michael of Bergamo, who arranged the remains in the crypt.
25 Crypt of the Original Sin
Cripta del Peccato Originale
Italy40.618° N 16.557° E
Circolo La Scaletta · Public domain Hidden in a cave on the side of a ravine outside Matera, the Crypt of the Original Sin holds one of the most remarkable cycles of early medieval wall painting in southern Italy, so complete and so vivid that it has been called the Sistine Chapel of rock-cut art.
Did you know? The Genesis cycle opens with the creation of Light and Darkness, shown not as abstract shapes but as a woman and a man.
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 mystical places in Italy?
- On our list, Su Nuraxi di Barumini ranks first, followed by Craco and Rock Drawings in Valcamonica.
- What are the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo?
- They are burial vaults beneath the Capuchin monastery in Palermo where, from the late 16th century, friars and later wealthy citizens were preserved and displayed, many dressed in their own clothes. Thousands of bodies line the corridors.
- What does the name Pentedattilo mean?
- Pentedattilo comes from the Greek for five fingers, after the hand-shaped rock that rises above the village in Calabria.
- What is the Fontanelle cemetery in Naples?
- It is a former tuff quarry in the Sanità district used as an ossuary, filled with the remains of victims of plagues and epidemics. In the 19th and 20th centuries locals adopted individual skulls, cleaning and praying for them in a popular cult of the souls.
- How many mystical places are on this list in Italy?
- The list covers 25 mystical places.