Italy's Underrated Cities: The Ones Worth Your Time and Why

Every Italy travel article uses the phrase "hidden gem." It has been used so often that it means nothing — Venice's back canals are "hidden gems." The Borghese Gallery is a "hidden gem." The entire country is apparently a hidden gem hiding in plain sight. This guide avoids that language entirely. The cities below are not hidden — they are documented, accessible, and have train connections. What they lack is international tourist infrastructure and the associated crowd problems. What they offer is the thing mass tourism destroys: the sense of being in a city that exists for its residents, not for you.

Lecce: The Florence of the South

The comparison to Florence is imprecise but gestures at something real: Lecce is the most architecturally coherent city in southern Italy, its centro storico almost entirely built in a single local stone (leccese limestone, a fine-grained golden-yellow rock that is soft when quarried and hardens on exposure to air) over a concentrated building period from 1600 to 1750. The result is a city with a stylistic consistency — exuberant, detailed, almost organic Baroque carving covering every available surface — that Florence lacks. Where Florence is composed of competing styles across multiple centuries, Lecce is a single conversation in one material about one set of aesthetic principles.

The specific achievement: Lecce's Baroque is not Roman or Neapolitan Baroque transplanted to the south. It is local — developed by local architects (Zimbalo, Cino, Riccardi) working with local craftsmen who treated the soft leccese stone the way northern sculptors treated marble. The portal of the Church of Santa Croce (begun 1548, completed 1695 — the Baroque carving is concentrated in the upper facade from the 1650s onward) is the standard reference point, but the cumulative effect of walking the historic center — the Piazza del Duomo, the Roman amphitheater embedded in Piazza Sant'Oronzo, the dozens of churches along Via Giuseppe Libertini — is the real argument for the city.

Getting there: Lecce is 1h 30min from Bari by Frecciargento (€15–30), 8 hours from Rome by Frecciargento direct (€50–90). The city has a small international airport (Brindisi, 30km away, Ryanair connections) and is easily combined with the Salento peninsula (the heel of Italy's boot — limestone, fig trees, turquoise Adriatic, baroque towns).

Where to eat: Trattoria Casareccia (Via Costadura 19, cash only, fixed lunch menu €15 including wine — book by phone or arrive before 12:30); Osteria degli Spiriti (Via Cesare Battisti 4, excellent ciceri e tria — chickpea and pasta dish unique to Salento, €22–30/person).

Trieste: The City Without a Country

Trieste occupies a unique position in European cultural geography: it was the primary Habsburg port city, the most important city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Mediterranean access, and became Italian only in 1920 (under the Treaty of Rapallo). Its population was — and its culture remains — a mixture of Italian, Slovenian, Austrian, Greek, Serbian, and Jewish communities that no single national identity fully describes. James Joyce lived and worked here from 1904 to 1920, writing Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the majority of Ulysses in a city he found both provincial and cosmopolitan. Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies at the castle of Duino, 12km from the city.

Trieste's architecture is almost entirely 18th–19th century Habsburg — wide Viennese avenues, neoclassical government buildings, and the extraordinary Piazza Unità d'Italia (the largest sea-facing piazza in Europe, bordered on three sides by monumental buildings and opening directly onto the Gulf of Trieste). The city's literary cafes (the Caffè degli Specchi, the Caffè San Marco — open since 1914, one of the most beautiful cafes in Europe with its original painted ceiling and wood paneling) are as important as its monuments.

The wine region: the Karst plateau behind Trieste (Carso in Italian, Kras in Slovenian) produces Vitovska and Terrano wines that are barely known outside the region and are extraordinary — particularly the skin-contact orange wines made by producers like Skerk, Zidarich, and Vodopivec who have been working the Karst limestone terroir for decades. A half-day wine tour of the Carso from Trieste is one of the best wine experiences in Italy for a fraction of the Barolo or Brunello price.

The Resistance question: Trieste was occupied by German forces after September 1943 and then by Yugoslav forces for 40 days in May 1945. The Yugoslav occupation involved executions of Italian civilians and political opponents, some thrown into the foibe (Karst cave systems). This history — the foibe massacres — was suppressed in Italian public memory for decades (it complicated the postwar political narrative) and has only recently been openly discussed and commemorated (the Giorno del Ricordo, February 10, was established by law in 2004). Trieste's relationship with this history is still emotionally charged.

Lucca: The Walled City That Refused to be Conquered

Lucca maintained its independence as a republic from 1160 to 1799 — through the era of Florentine expansion, Pisan ambition, Genoese commercial imperialism, and repeated foreign interventions, Lucca remained self-governing. This is the most remarkable political achievement of any small Italian city-state: 639 years of continuous republican independence in the most contested corner of Italy.

The physical expression of this independence is the city walls — built 1504–1645, 4.2 kilometers long, 12 meters wide, and still completely intact. The ramparts are now a public park (free, open 24 hours) where Lucchesi walk, run, cycle, and sit on benches facing the Apuan Alps. It is the best urban walk in Tuscany and one of the most pleasant city walks in Italy. The walk is at tree-canopy level (the walls are planted with plane trees) and the view is two-way: inward to the red-tiled city, outward to the hills.

The city inside the walls is a complete medieval urban organism: 100 medieval towers (reduced from the original 130 by various demolitions, but still the most concentrated tower landscape in northern Italy outside San Gimignano), Romanesque churches (San Michele in Foro, built over the Roman forum — the facade dates 1143, the interior is 12th century; San Frediano, 6th century foundation with extraordinary 13th century mosaic facade), and the elliptical Piazza dell'Anfiteatro — the medieval city built inside and around the Roman amphitheater, the ellipse preserved by the curve of the surrounding buildings.

Puccini was born here (Via di Poggio 30, now the Casa Museo Giacomo Puccini, open daily, €7) — the connection is maintained with notable intensity. The Lucca Summer Festival (July) brings major international acts to the central piazze.

Bergamo: Two Cities in One

Bergamo is two cities physically stacked: the Città Alta (upper city, at 380 meters, medieval, walled, Venetian) and the Città Bassa (lower city, modern, commercial, Milan-adjacent). The cable car between them (Funicolare, €1.30) is 90 seconds. Most visitors stay in one or the other; the interesting ones move between them.

The Città Alta is one of the most completely preserved medieval cityscapes in Italy: the Venetian walls (Mura Veneziane, UNESCO World Heritage Site) of 1561–1588 surround a city of extraordinary architectural quality. The Piazza Vecchia is flanked by the Palazzo della Ragione (1199 — with a Venetian lion of St. Mark added in the 15th century) and the Palazzo del Podestà (16th century). The Cappella Colleoni (1476, designed by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo) is one of the most elaborate early Renaissance facades in northern Italy, commissioned by the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni as his own private chapel/mausoleum — the interior contains his equestrian coffin, elevated above the floor, and a painted wooden crucifix of extraordinary sensitivity.

The Accademia Carrara (Piazza Giacomo Carrara, €10, closed Monday) is one of the best Italian painting collections outside Milan and Florence — Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Lotto, Moroni. Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520–1578), a Bergamo-born portraitist, is represented here more completely than anywhere else; his portraits of Bergamasque merchants and nobles are among the most psychologically acute works of the 16th century.

Donizetti was born in Bergamo (1797) and the Teatro Donizetti runs his operas during the Donizetti Opera Festival (November–December). His birthplace museum (open by appointment, Via Borgo Canale 14) preserves the room where he was born in a working-class family in the lower part of the Città Alta.

Matera: 9,000 Years in the Same Ravine

Matera is not underrated in the way the other cities in this guide are — it is increasingly well-known since its 2019 European Capital of Culture designation. But it remains undervisited relative to its importance, partly because it is difficult to reach (no high-speed train, small airport, 4.5 hours from Rome by train) and partly because the sheer strangeness of the city — a settlement continuously inhabited for 9,000 years in cave dwellings carved from the ravine walls — exceeds what most people's travel imagination expects of Italy.

The Sassi di Matera — the cave district — were inhabited until 1952 when the Italian government forcibly relocated approximately 15,000 people to new public housing on the plateau above. Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), the most important non-fiction book about the Italian south, describes the conditions that made this relocation both necessary and traumatic. The relocated residents' descendants have spent the last 30 years buying their old cave dwellings back and converting them into hotels, restaurants, and residences. The Sassi are now UNESCO World Heritage and contain approximately 3,000 cave dwellings, 150 rock-cut churches with medieval frescoes, and a growing number of boutique hotels (cave hotels, sleeping in the tufa rock, are extraordinary experiences — Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita and Palazzo Viceconte are the finest).

Ferrara: The Renaissance City the Tourists Forgot

Ferrara was one of the most important courts in Renaissance Italy — the Este family ruled from 1264 to 1598 and spent lavishly on art, architecture, music, and scholarship. Ariosto wrote the Orlando Furioso here (1516–1532, the greatest Italian Renaissance epic). Tasso wrote Jerusalem Delivered here. The court painters (Cosimo Tura, Francesco del Cossa, Ercole de' Roberti) developed a Ferrarese style of painting — intense, slightly hallucinatory, with hard-edged figures and theatrical use of light — that influenced northern European painting in ways art historians are still mapping.

The city is UNESCO World Heritage. The Castello Estense (the moated medieval castle in the city center, 1385, open Tue–Sun, €10), the Palazzo Schifanoia (with its extraordinary Room of the Months fresco cycle by Francesco del Cossa, 1469–70, €6), the Pinacoteca Nazionale (€4, Ferrarese painting collection of extraordinary quality), and the Jewish Ghetto (preserved since 1624, the Museo Nazionale dell'Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah operates there — free, Mon–Sun) are all within walking distance. The city's bike culture (more bicycles per capita than any other Italian city) gives it a pleasantly Dutch atmosphere.

Trani: Apulia's Cathedral on the Water

Trani is a small Apulian port town (55,000 inhabitants) 43km north of Bari, and its cathedral is the most dramatically sited church in Italy. The Cathedral of San Nicola Pellegrino (1099–1143, completed with additions through the 13th century) is built directly on a rocky promontory extending into the Adriatic — three sides of the building are surrounded by sea. At sunset the white limestone turns gold, the water reflects the light, and the scene is one of the most purely beautiful in southern Italy. No entry fee, open daily, no queue, no advance booking, no tourist shuttle from a cruise ship.

Trani was a major trading port in the 11th–13th centuries — the Ordinamenta et consuetudo maris (1063), one of the earliest codifications of maritime law in Europe, was compiled here. Merchants from Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and the eastern Mediterranean operated from its harbor. The medieval Jewish community was significant — Trani has three 12th-century synagogues (more than any other Apulian city), two of which became churches and retain their original internal structure. The Scolanova synagogue (Via Scolanova 26, now the church of Santa Maria di Scolanova) can be visited — its Gothic arches and spatial organization are unmistakably synagogue rather than church architecture.

Trani's wine: the Corato and Castel del Monte DOC zones that surround Trani produce Nero di Troia (a tannic, structured red indigenous to northern Puglia) and Bombino Nero and Bianco. The best producers — Rivera, Tormaresca, Conte Spagnoletti Zeuli — are all within 20km of the city. Enoteca Divinus (Via Ognissanti 16) is the best wine bar in the city for exploring the local canon.

Getting there: 30 minutes from Bari by regional train (€3.60, trains every 30–60 minutes). Easily combined with Bari in a day, or used as a base for exploring northern Puglia (Castel del Monte, the Norman-Aragonese octagonal fortress built by Frederick II around 1240, is 30km inland — a UNESCO site with no entry queue and extraordinary mathematical proportions).

Reggio Emilia: The City That Made the Italian Flag

Reggio Emilia is a prosperous, orderly city of 172,000 people in the Po Valley, between Parma and Modena. It is best known in Italy for two things: the Reggio Emilia educational approach (Reggio Children — the progressive early childhood pedagogy developed here from the 1960s by Loris Malaguzzi, now internationally influential) and for being the city where the Italian tricolor flag was officially adopted for the first time. On 7 January 1797, the Congress of Reggio Emilia proclaimed the Cispadane Republic and adopted the green-white-red flag as the national symbol — the same flag the Italian Republic still flies. The Teatro Municipale Romolo Valli (Piazza Martiri del 7 Luglio — the piazza's name commemorates the date) hosts commemorations annually.

The food argument for Reggio Emilia: the city is within the Parmigiano-Reggiano production zone (the original, the name precedes Parma's association — the cheese is named for both cities equally). The Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano (Via Kennedy 18, open for visits Mon–Fri) offers guided tours of the cheese-making facilities and has a museum of 2,000 years of cheese-making history in the Po Valley. The tour (€10, 2 hours, includes tasting of aged parmigiano at 12, 24, and 36 months) is the best food tourism experience in Emilia-Romagna that isn't Eataly.

The Musei Civici (Piazza Casotti, €5, closed Monday) house one of the most significant prehistoric collections in northern Italy — the site of Terramara di Montale (15km from the city, Bronze Age pile-dwelling village, open weekends) is the best-preserved Bronze Age village in the Po Valley and has an excellent museum in the partially reconstructed ancient settlement. This combination (Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese + 3,500-year-old Bronze Age village + the birthplace of the Italian flag) in a single day visit from Bologna (17 minutes by high-speed train) is possibly the most information-dense tourism available in northern Italy.

Quick Comparison: Why Go Instead of the Obvious Choice

Q&A: Underrated Italy

Why aren't these cities more visited?

Several reasons: difficulty of access (Matera has no high-speed rail), marketing budget (small cities can't compete with Rome and Venice for tourism board spending), the self-reinforcing loop of infrastructure (more visitors means more hotels means more visitors), and the genuine absence of a single overwhelmingly famous attraction that anchors a visit (Lecce has extraordinary Baroque, but no Colosseum). These are features for the right traveler, not bugs.

Are these cities suitable for a first trip to Italy?

Any of them can anchor a first trip, but combining them with one major city (Rome or Florence) is more practical for first-timers who want to calibrate Italian travel. Experienced Italy visitors benefit most from a trip built entirely around second-tier cities — this is the most efficient way to experience Italian regional diversity.

Is Matera worth the difficult access?

Yes, unambiguously. Matera is the most unusual urban landscape in Europe and the best-preserved evidence of what human settlement looked like in this part of the world for most of recorded history. The access difficulty is part of why it remains extraordinary.

Which of these cities has the best food?

Lecce for Salentino cuisine (ciceri e tria, rustico leccese, frisella); Ferrara for the most distinctive local food culture in northern Italy (cappellacci di zucca, salama da sugo — a unique spiced pork sausage aged up to a year and served hot, extraordinary); Trieste for the Habsburg-influenced food culture (jota stew, gulasch, strudel alongside Adriatic fish).

What Nobody Tells You About Italy's Secondary Cities

The Secondary Cities Have Better Aperitivo Culture

In Venice, Florence, and Rome, aperitivo is increasingly a tourist performance. In Lecce, Bergamo Alta, Trieste's Piazza Unità, and Lucca's center bars, aperitivo is what the locals do every evening and has not been modified for tourist preferences. The drinks are cheaper, the food is more generous, and the company is local. This is the single most efficient upgrade available to Italy travelers.

Hotel Prices Are 40–60% Lower

A 4-star hotel in Lecce costs €80–120/night in high season. The equivalent in Florence is €200–350. A boutique cave hotel in Matera (extraordinary experience) costs €150–200. The quality differential is zero or negative — secondary city hotels have less tourist infrastructure but often better service and more personal atmosphere than the large tourist-city properties at the same price point.

Related Reading on ItalyPlanner.ai

• Lecce Complete Guide: Baroque Capital of the South
• Cagliari: One Day Ashore Guide
• Italy History Timeline: Context for Every City
• Where to Stay in Tuscany: Beyond Florence