Walking the Via Francigena does not mean choosing between a walking holiday and Italy's cultural highlights.
Quite the opposite.
From the Great St Bernard Pass to Rome, the route connects historic villages, medieval towns, churches, castles and landscapes that have welcomed travellers for centuries. Some are internationally famous; others are places you might never think of visiting if the trail did not lead you there.
And that is part of what makes the Via Francigena different.
You can visit San Gimignano by car, walk through its medieval streets and admire its famous towers. Or you can spend the morning walking towards them, watching that unmistakable skyline gradually appear above the Tuscan hills.
You can visit a fortified village because it is on a list of things to see. Or you can reach its gate at the end of a day's walk and understand immediately why a settlement was built exactly there.
The places may be the same. The perspective is completely different.
The Italian Via Francigena crosses seven regions on its way towards Rome, passing through landscapes and communities that change dramatically along the route. Here are some of the most beautiful villages and historic towns to discover along the way — selected not only for what there is to see, but for what it feels like to reach them on foot.
And if you want to experience them without having to organise every detail yourself, SloWays has been taking travellers along the Via Francigena for more than twenty years. As an official partner of the European Association of the Via Francigena Ways (EAVF), we know the route not simply as a line on a map, but as a journey made of trails, communities, cultural heritage and all the places worth slowing down for along the way.
Because the Via Francigena was never simply a scenic trail.
During the Middle Ages, it formed part of the network connecting northern and western Europe with Rome, one of Christianity's great pilgrimage destinations. Rather than one fixed road, it developed as a network of routes converging around important crossing points and settlements.
Travellers needed places to sleep, eat, cross rivers, trade and receive assistance. Churches, hospices, monasteries and settlements grew along the road, while existing towns benefited from the constant movement of pilgrims, merchants and travellers.
Today, that history is still visible.
Walking the Via Francigena means moving between places that were often connected long before modern roads or railways existed — and discovering how geography, history and human movement shaped them.
If you begin the Italian Via Francigena at the Great St Bernard Pass, the first days immediately establish what makes this journey special.
You descend through an immense Alpine landscape towards the villages of the Aosta Valley, and Étroubles is one of the places that introduces you to the inhabited side of the route.
After the openness of the mountains, arriving among stone houses and narrow streets makes the transition particularly tangible. You are no longer simply crossing an Alpine landscape: you are following a route that has brought people through these valleys for centuries.
Étroubles also establishes a pattern that will repeat itself throughout the Via Francigena. The landscape changes, a settlement appears, you walk through it — and then the road continues.
Why it is special on foot: because after descending from the Great St Bernard, the village feels like a natural gateway between the high Alps and the cultural landscapes ahead.
Further south, the Via Francigena reaches Ivrea, and the cultural story changes completely.
Ivrea has a long history, but it is also internationally recognised for something much more recent: its extraordinary relationship with Olivetti. The Industrial City of Ivrea is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognised as an important expression of 20th-century ideas about architecture, industry and social organisation.
That makes Ivrea particularly interesting on a journey usually associated with medieval pilgrimage.
The Via Francigena is often described through churches, abbeys and ancient roads, but walking through Ivrea reminds you that these places did not stop evolving when the pilgrims moved on. They continued accumulating architecture, stories and identities.
You arrive following an ancient route and find yourself in a city that tells a very modern Italian story.
Why it is special on foot: because it demonstrates that the Francigena is not a journey through one historical period, but through many layers of Italian history.
By the time you reach Vercelli, the Alps have given way to the broad plains of Piedmont.
The landscape itself changes the rhythm of the journey. Mountains and steep valleys are replaced by open agricultural land, and the historic city becomes a cultural landmark within an entirely different environment.
Vercelli has long been associated with the Francigena and pilgrimage routes, and its religious heritage — including the striking Basilica of Sant'Andrea — makes it worth more than a quick overnight stop.
But walking also gives context to the city.
You have crossed the surrounding landscape before entering its streets. Instead of appearing as an isolated collection of monuments, Vercelli becomes part of the geography through which you have travelled.
Why it is special on foot: because the approach across the plains makes the contrast between rural landscape and historic city particularly clear.
Some cultural sites make even more sense when you encounter them as part of a journey.
Fidenza Cathedral is one of them.
Fidenza has been an important point on the Via Francigena for centuries, and its cathedral is closely connected with the culture of medieval travel and pilgrimage. For a modern walker, it is one of those places where the historic identity of the route becomes particularly easy to understand.
There is another connection here that makes Fidenza particularly significant to us at SloWays: the city is home to the European Association of the Via Francigena Ways (EAVF), of which SloWays is an official partner. The Association works with the territories crossed by the route to protect, develop and promote the Via Francigena as a European cultural itinerary — a living journey rather than simply a historic road.
By this stage, you are also approaching another important geographical transition: the Apennines.
The plains are coming to an end and the route begins preparing to climb towards the Passo della Cisa before descending into Lunigiana.
Fidenza therefore feels less like an isolated sightseeing stop and more like a threshold — historically, geographically and, even today, in the life of the Via Francigena.
Why it is special on foot: because its cultural heritage and geographical position both belong to the story of travelling towards Rome.
Tuscany does not begin with vineyards and cypress-lined hills.
For Via Francigena walkers arriving from the north, it begins with the Lunigiana.
After crossing the Passo della Cisa, the route descends through a greener, more mountainous landscape towards Pontremoli, a historic town of stone streets, bridges and castles.
This is a very different Tuscany from the one most travellers picture — and that is precisely why Pontremoli deserves a place on this list.
The official Tuscan Via Francigena enters the region from the Cisa and continues through Pontremoli before travelling south towards Lucca, San Gimignano, Siena and eventually Radicofani.
Arriving on foot makes that geography understandable in a way a map rarely can. You have physically crossed the Apennines, and Pontremoli marks the beginning of a new region and a new chapter of the journey.
Why it is special on foot: because it is the reward after an important mountain crossing and reveals a less familiar side of Tuscany.
Then comes one of the places almost everyone already knows.
San Gimignano is famous for its medieval skyline, but its relationship with the Via Francigena is much deeper than its popularity with modern visitors.
During the Middle Ages, the town was an important stopping point for pilgrims travelling to and from Rome. Its wealthy families built dozens of tower houses as expressions of status and power; fourteen survive today, and its historic centre is recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But one of the best things about San Gimignano happens before you enter it.
You see it coming.
Its towers gradually rise above the hills as you approach on foot, turning a skyline you may have seen hundreds of times in photographs into a destination at the end of your own walking day.
San Gimignano can be busy. Walking there does not make it a secret.
It simply gives you a completely different way of arriving.
Why it is special on foot: because the famous skyline becomes part of the landscape long before you reach the town itself.
If San Gimignano gives you one of the great approaches of the Via Francigena, Monteriggioni gives you one of its most satisfying arrivals.
The tiny fortified settlement sits behind an almost complete ring of medieval walls and towers. The official Tuscan route connects San Gimignano with Monteriggioni before continuing onwards to Siena.
Its compact size is part of its charm.
You do not need a list of ten things to see. You approach the walls, pass through the gate and find yourself inside a village whose physical form still makes its defensive purpose immediately obvious.
Then, eventually, you put your backpack on again and continue.
That simplicity is exactly what makes Monteriggioni such a perfect Francigena stop.
Why it is special on foot: because walking through its gate makes the medieval village feel like part of the road rather than a monument beside it.
South of Siena, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the villages from the landscape around them.
And that is the point.
The Val d'Orcia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site not simply because it is beautiful, but because it represents a cultural landscape shaped by centuries of interaction between people, agriculture and the land. UNESCO specifically includes the Via Francigena and its associated abbeys, inns, shrines and bridges among the elements that contribute to this landscape.
San Quirico d'Orcia sits right in the middle of it.
Walking here means experiencing the famous Tuscan landscape not as a panorama viewed from a car window, but as terrain: hills you climb, roads you follow, farmhouses you pass and villages you gradually approach.
The route itself is part of the heritage you have come to see.
Why it is special on foot: because here the journey, the village and the surrounding landscape are all part of the same cultural story.
Further south, Radicofani rises dramatically above the Val d'Orcia.
Its fortress dominates the landscape from a strategic position that becomes very easy to understand when you approach it on foot.
The Val d'Orcia's UNESCO designation includes the historic settlements and the Via Francigena as interconnected parts of this cultural landscape, and Radicofani is one of the places where that relationship between road, geography and settlement feels particularly strong.
There is also a simple physical truth involved:
Radicofani is high.
Walking towards it makes you experience the terrain that gave the settlement its importance. The climb is not merely something to endure before sightseeing; it explains the place.
Why it is special on foot: because reaching the fortress under your own power makes its commanding position impossible to ignore.
After Tuscany, the Via Francigena enters Lazio and the landscape changes once again.
One of the most memorable transitions is the arrival at Lake Bolsena.
After the rolling agricultural landscapes of southern Tuscany and northern Lazio, the appearance of this enormous volcanic lake feels like a genuine change of chapter.
Bolsena, sitting on its shores, combines a historic centre and important religious heritage with a completely different atmosphere from the hill towns that came before.
This is another reason to resist thinking of the Via Francigena as a collection of individual attractions.
The pleasure is in the transitions between them.
Mountains become plains. Plains become hills. Hills open onto a lake. Eventually, the route begins its final approach towards Rome.
Why it is special on foot: because seeing the lake emerge after days of walking makes the change in landscape feel like part of the journey itself.
Before the Via Francigena reaches Rome, Viterbo provides one of its last major historic urban stops.
Known for its remarkably atmospheric medieval centre and its association with the medieval papacy, Viterbo deserves time beyond simply arriving, sleeping and leaving again the next morning.
And this is where a walking holiday can sometimes benefit from slowing down even further.
A journey on foot does not have to mean maximising the number of kilometres you cover each day. If a place contains enough history, art or architecture to deserve an afternoon — or an extra night — staying longer is entirely consistent with the spirit of slow travel.
After Viterbo, Rome is drawing closer.
The journey is no longer an abstract line on a map. By this point, you have travelled through the Alps, crossed plains and mountain passes, walked through Tuscany and entered Lazio one stage at a time.
Why it is special on foot: because it is one of the final great historic cities before the destination towards which the route has been leading all along.
It is certainly the most famous.
And for good reason.
The Tuscan Via Francigena connects places such as Pontremoli, Lucca, San Gimignano, Monteriggioni, Siena, San Quirico d'Orcia and Radicofani, while crossing landscapes that have become visual symbols of Italy. San Gimignano is UNESCO listed, while the Val d'Orcia is itself protected as a cultural landscape in which the Via Francigena forms part of the historic fabric.
But describing the Francigena as a Tuscan walk misses much of what makes it extraordinary.
Starting further north allows you to experience the transition between regions: from Alpine villages in Valle d'Aosta to the plains of Piedmont and Lombardy, across the Apennines and into Lunigiana, and only then into the landscapes most commonly associated with Tuscany.
The beautiful villages are not concentrated in one postcard-perfect section.
They tell different parts of the same journey.
Walking does not make famous places less famous.
San Gimignano may still be busy when you arrive. Siena does not suddenly become a hidden village because you walked there. Rome certainly will not be empty.
But walking changes your relationship with them.
When travelling conventionally, destinations are often disconnected: you leave one place, spend time in transit, and arrive at the next.
On the Via Francigena, the space between destinations becomes part of the experience.
You see where towns sit in relation to rivers and mountains. You understand why a fortress occupies a particular hill. You notice how cultivated landscapes change around different communities.
And perhaps most importantly, you develop a sense of arrival.
There is a difference between visiting somewhere and reaching it.
The Via Francigena gives you both.
Absolutely — and this is one of the route's greatest strengths.
A walking holiday along the Via Francigena does not require you to spend every available hour on the trail. Choosing appropriate daily distances can leave time to explore churches, museums, castles and historic centres after you arrive.
And this is also where travelling with SloWays gives you more possibilities than simply following the trail from one accommodation to the next. We can help shape the itinerary around what interests you most, adding extra nights in places you want to explore properly, as well as guided visits, food and wine tastings and other local experiences that give you a deeper understanding of the places you are walking through.
If cultural visits are particularly important to you, consider planning your itinerary around them.
A shorter walking stage before an important town can give you an afternoon to explore. An additional night in a larger cultural centre can turn an overnight stop into a genuine part of the journey. A guided visit can reveal the history behind a place you have spent the day approaching, while a tasting can connect the landscape you have just crossed with the food and wine produced there.
This is particularly useful in places where there is simply too much to see in an evening.
Tell us what you are interested in when planning your Via Francigena journey and we can help you find the right balance between time on the trail and time discovering what lies around it.
The goal is not to fit as many kilometres and monuments as possible into the same holiday.
It is to give both the walking and the places you reach enough time to matter.
There is no single answer, because each part of the route tells a different story.
The northern sections combine Alpine landscapes with places such as Étroubles, Ivrea and Vercelli, before the route crosses the Po Valley and approaches the Apennines.
The section around Fidenza and Pontremoli makes the relationship between pilgrimage routes and geographical crossings particularly tangible.
Tuscany offers the greatest concentration of internationally famous cultural destinations, including San Gimignano and the Val d'Orcia, both recognised by UNESCO.
Lazio, meanwhile, brings together medieval towns, religious heritage and the growing anticipation of approaching Rome.
For a first Via Francigena journey, Tuscany remains an obvious choice — but it is only one chapter of a much longer road.
SloWays offers self-guided walking holidays along different sections of the Via Francigena, so you do not need to walk the entire route — or decide where to begin entirely on your own. The right section depends on how much time you have, the difficulty you are comfortable with, the landscapes you want to experience and, as we have seen, the places and cultural heritage you most want to discover.
Perhaps this is what makes the route so different from a conventional tour of Italy.
You can build an itinerary around famous names: San Gimignano, Siena, the Val d'Orcia, eventually Rome.
But when you walk between them, the places you had never heard of begin to matter too.
A small village where you stop for coffee. A church you enter because the door happens to be open. A fortified town that first appears as a shape on the horizon. The piazza where you sit after taking off your walking shoes.
The Via Francigena does not ask you to choose between Italy's famous cultural heritage and the quieter pleasure of discovering somewhere slowly.
It connects the two.
And sometimes the most memorable thing about a beautiful Italian village is not what you find when you get there.
It is the road that brought you to its door.
If you would like to experience that road for yourself, SloWays can take care of the practical side of your Via Francigena journey — from carefully selected accommodation and luggage transfers to navigation and on-trip assistance — while also helping you add the cultural experiences that make the route yours.
Some of the most beautiful villages and historic towns along the Italian Via Francigena include Étroubles, Ivrea, Vercelli, Fidenza, Pontremoli, San Gimignano, Monteriggioni, San Quirico d'Orcia, Radicofani, Bolsena and Viterbo. They represent very different parts of the route, from the Alps and northern Italian plains to Tuscany and Lazio.
For walkers following the traditional Italian route from north to south, the Via Francigena enters Italy at the Great St Bernard Pass in Valle d'Aosta before descending towards the Aosta Valley and continuing through northern and central Italy towards Rome.
Yes. San Gimignano was historically an important stopping point for pilgrims travelling to and from Rome along the Via Francigena. Its medieval historic centre is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Yes. The Tuscan Via Francigena passes through the fortified village of Monteriggioni on its way towards Siena, making it one of the most distinctive medieval stops along this section of the route.
Yes. The Via Francigena crosses the UNESCO-listed Val d'Orcia cultural landscape. The historic route and associated structures such as abbeys, inns, shrines and bridges form part of the landscape's cultural heritage.
Part of Ivrea is UNESCO listed as Ivrea, Industrial City of the 20th Century. The site reflects the social and architectural ideas developed around Olivetti, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s.
Tuscany has one of the highest concentrations of famous historic towns and cultural landscapes along the Via Francigena, including San Gimignano, Monteriggioni, Siena, San Quirico d'Orcia and Radicofani. However, the northern sections and Lazio offer a different mix of Alpine villages, historic cities, religious heritage and medieval settlements.
Yes. The route gives walkers access to several places associated with UNESCO World Heritage, including San Gimignano and the Val d'Orcia in Tuscany. Ivrea also contains the UNESCO-listed Industrial City of the 20th Century.
Yes. Daily stages can be planned to leave time for museums, churches and historic centres, while extra nights can give you more time in particularly important destinations. SloWays can also arrange additional experiences such as guided visits and food and wine tastings, allowing you to combine walking with a deeper exploration of the cultural heritage along the route.
Yes. SloWays is an official partner of the European Association of the Via Francigena Ways (EAVF), the organisation based in Fidenza that works with the territories along the route to promote and develop the Via Francigena as a European Cultural Route.
No. The Via Francigena can be walked in individual sections. SloWays offers itineraries along different parts of the route, allowing you to choose according to the landscape, difficulty, time available and cultural places you are most interested in.
Depending on the itinerary, additional nights, guided visits, tastings and other local experiences can be added to a SloWays Via Francigena holiday. This can be particularly useful if you want more time to explore the historic and cultural sites along the route rather than treating them simply as overnight stops.
Written by the SloWays Team
Nominee Best Specialist Tour Operator 2025
Touroperating
S-Cape Countryside Travels srl
Borgo Allegri 16R
50122 Firenze FI
P. IVA 05227330486
