Autumn in Italy is the season the Italians keep for themselves. The tourists have largely gone, the light has turned golden and low, the harvests are in and the kitchens are cooking at their very best. Truffles are appearing in the markets of Umbria and Piedmont, the vendemmia has just finished and the wine is in the barrels and the forests of the Apennines are turning every shade of amber and copper. Here is our edit of the best places to be this autumn.
Oltrepò Pavese, Lombardy
The Oltrepò Pavese is quietly one of the most rewarding wine landscapes in northern Italy and in autumn, with the vendemmia finished and the hills covered in the amber and burgundy of spent vineyards, it is genuinely one of the most underrated destinations to visit. Pinot Nero, Barbera, Croatina and Riesling Italico all thrive on these slopes, producing wines of real character; but beyond the wine, this is a concentration of medieval history: among castles, fortresses and towers there are over a hundred historic sites to discover.
What to do
Renting a car is highly recommended so you can explore the area (and its wineries) with ease. One in particular, though do make a reservation well in advance, is the Castello di Stefanago, one of the finest private cellars in the zone, open for visits by appointment and whose tower offers the extraordinary spectacle of four regions meeting on the horizon. Another is the Castello di Cigognola, dating back to the early 13th century and today a family-run winery of real quality. For a dose of culture, head to the medieval village of Zavattarello, perched on its hill with views stretching out across the Apennines. Worth the walk is a visit to the Castello Dal Verme, built in the 10th century at the behest of Milan’s Monastery of Sant’Ambrogio and acquired in 1390 by the Dal Verme family, one of the most influential dynasties of the era. Nearby, don’t miss Fortunago, a small ancient Celtic settlement perched on a hillside and surrounded by chestnut trees, and one of Italy’s most beautiful villages.
What to eat
Osteria La Cadrega, Soriasco
In the small village of Soriasco, La Cadrega is the project of Samuele and Denisa , a couple who spent years in professional hospitality before opening exactly the kind of place they always wanted to work in. Tables look out over the vineyard-dotted hills of the Oltrepò Pavese, the kitchen cooks entirely from scratch and the menu follows the season without compromise: fresh pasta, slow-cooked ragù, house-made mostarda. Order the maltagliati with duck ragù and mostarda and understand immediately why this small osteria is worth going out of your way for.
Ristorante Bazzini, canneto pavese
A historic address in Oltrepò Pavese dating back to 1939, Ristorante Bazzini pairs elegant, sober rooms with genuinely warm, family-run hospitality. The kitchen follows the seasons, refreshing its menu weekly while keeping beloved local classics like the historic “Bata Lavar” dish. Expect homemade ravioli, regional risottos, and cured meats and cheeses to start, finished with simple, homestyle desserts such as apple tarte tatin with house-made fior di latte gelato.
Where to sleep
Il Casale Denari
Born as an Augustinian monastery, this centuries-old casale in the Oltrepò Pavese hills fell into disuse before being revived by Alberto Bertuzzi Borgognoni, great-nephew of Duke Antonio Denari, and his wife Azzurra Scerni, who left Milan to restore the estate after years of painstaking work. In 2018 Azzurra opened one of Italy’s first flower farms here, teaching floral courses and cultivating cut flowers across the grounds; since 2022 the estate has also welcomed guests, offering rooms steeped in the scents of the countryside for a full immersion in nature, hills and flowers. Guests can dine at the on-site Hostaria, launched in the early 1960s by Duke Antonio Denari as a pioneering farm-to-table concept and still serving traditional local dishes today.
Tenuta Pizzone
Tenuta Pizzone opened in 2019 when the Vistarini family restored a portion of their working farmhouse in the Oltrepò Pavese to create an agriturismo with five individually furnished rooms. The property has all the architectural character you’d expect from a traditional Lombard cascina, updated with carefully chosen materials and furnishings that reflect the family’s attention to detail. Guests are here to experience the estate in full, including the wines of Cantina Mezzacane, the family’s own label dedicated to producing wines of ancient character and genuine quality.
Borgo dei Gatti
An albergo diffuso set within the stone houses of medieval Golferenzo, Borgo dei Gatti has restored its old farmhouses with respectful care: wooden beams, terrazzo floors and earth-toned walls preserving the atmosphere of the original peasant homes, paired with essential modern comfort. Surrounded by vineyard-laced hills, the borgo offers its own food-and-wine trio: La Corte del Lupo, a modern osteria; La Bottega del Lino, a boutique for local products; and L’Olmo Napoleonico, the village’s historic pizzeria-restaurant helmed by chef Ivan Milani. At the latter, the kitchen pairs wood-fired pizza with genuine, tradition-rooted cooking.
Villa Eleonora, Mornico Losana
Built in 1925 and rooted in a century of winemaking history, Villa Eleonora has recently reopened after a careful restoration as a luxury retreat for up to ten guests in the hills of Oltrepò Pavese. The original architecture has been preserved and the interiors reinterpreted with a contemporary lightness, featuring five bedrooms, generous living spaces, panoramic terraces and a private pool, all looking out over the rolling hills. Ideal for an intimate stay with family or friends.
l’aquila, abruzzo
Hemmed in by mountains, Abruzzo is one of Italy’s best-off-the-beaten-track destinations. The city, capital of Abruzzo, set at 720 metres in a wide valley between the Gran Sasso and the Sirente-Velino massifs, was devastated by the earthquake of April 2009 and has spent the years since in a slow, occasionally frustrated but ultimately extraordinary process of reconstruction and renewal and the surrounding national park, the largest in the Apennines, is magnificent in autumn.
What to do
In L’Aquila, the MAXXI Museum, the national contemporary art museum’s outpost, opened in 2021 inside the painstakingly restored baroque Palazzo Ardinghelli, stages site-specific installations and rotating exhibitions of art, architecture and photography under director Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, a fitting symbol of the city’s rebirth after the 2009 earthquake. From there, head into the mountains for a trek to Rocca Calascio, the evocative ruined medieval castle made famous by the film Ladyhawke, which looms over the vast Campo Imperatore plateau in the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park. Along the way, stop to admire the beautiful Santa Maria della Pietà church, and at the castle’s foot you’ll find a tiny medieval village with an inn, a restaurant and a biscuit shop: the perfect spot to catch the sunset after your walk.
Where to eat
Førma restaurant
Set below the steps of the San Bernardino basilica, Førma is chef Simone Ciuffetelli’s tribute to seasonality and mindful eating, with a distinct Nordic-European touch shaped by his time in Melbourne and at Copenhagen’s Bæst. Fermentation, curing, and fish ageing techniques minimise waste while showcasing local ingredients. His wife Roberta curates the wine list, and the restaurant’s celebrated bread inspired the adjoining Førma Bakery, where they sell leavened products that merge Abruzzese tradition with Nordic influences from Ciuffetelli’s time in Copenhagen.
Lo Scalco dell’Aquila
Set in the historic center, Lo Scalco dell’Aquila builds its menu around memory, seasonality, and the raw materials of Abruzzo’s mountains and Adriatic coast. Dishes like Gran Sasso spaghettone with guanciale, ricotta and saffron, baccalà “all’aquilana,” and Parco lamb with juniper berries reflect a kitchen balancing tradition and creative technique. Alongside à la carte, tasting menus range from an all-vegetable path to “Territorio,” a five-course celebration of mountain lamb — with an exclusive chef’s-table experience available for one table only.
Where to sleep
Madi City Hotel
This hotel is brand new and pared-back, with everything needed for a comfortable stay: well-appointed rooms, just the right amount of design, and a thoroughly central location.
sextantio, Santo Stefano di Sessanio
Sextantio is an albergo diffuso set within a fortified medieval village at over 1,250 metres in the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park. A meticulous conservation project has restored the borgo’s stone houses, preserving original materials, hand-woven textiles, and traces of rural life, while rooms draw inspiration from 1920s photographs of Abruzzo. The experience extends to the table, with a kitchen dedicated to traditional Abruzzese cuisine, championing local, mountain-sourced ingredients alongside regional wines.
Casentino, tuscany
The Casentino is Tuscany’s best-kept secret. This valley in the eastern Apennines between Arezzo and Florence is mostly disregarded by visitors, yet offers some of the most stunning walks through the woods and panoramic views. The area is known for its mountain and hill landscapes filled with centuries-old beeches, silver firs and birches that together form an ecosystem of extraordinary biodiversity. But it is also a place of spiritual significance, thanks to the Sacred Hermitage and Monastery of Camaldoli, where over a thousand years ago Benedictine monks planted one of the original nuclei of the forest, known, accordingly, as the Camaldolese forest. In autumn, the Foresta della Verna and the surrounding chestnut and beech forests turn spectacular shades of copper and gold, the chestnuts fall in late October, and the valley’s farmhouses begin producing the season’s olive oil.
What to do
Walk the trails through the Foresta Casentinese, one of the oldest and most intact forests in Italy, a national park of extraordinary beauty shared with Emilia-Romagna. Visit the Sanctuary of La Verna, the clifftop Franciscan monastery where St Francis received the stigmata in 1224, perched above the forest at 1,128 metres with views that stretch in every direction. One of the most deeply rooted traditions of the Casentino is the castagnatura, the annual chestnut harvest that for centuries formed the backbone of mountain life here. Today, villages across the valley mark the season with the Sagra della Castagna, a traditional food festival, or better, ritual that brings locals together and celebrate this important moment. In particular, the Brigata di Raggiolo hosts the Festa della Castagnatura, held on the last Sunday of October in the village square where you can taste warm roasted chestnuts, cakes made with chestnut flour and scout around market stalls.
Where to eat
Mater
Chef-patron Filippo Baroni built a restaurant that feels like a physical extension of the Casentino forest itself. Interiors present large windows that face the surrounding hills, birch trunks as columns, a tree root at the centre of the room, parquet floors and a glass-fronted kitchen that lets you watch the brigade at work. Similarly, the cooking is rooted in centuries-old monastic recipes from the surrounding hermitages and convents, reinterpreted with precision and genuine intellectual curiosity: fermentations, preserves, wild herbs, ingredients sourced with meticulous attention.
La Torre di Garonza
Housed in a former agricultural storehouse just outside the fortified Castello di Gargonza, La Torre serves authentic Tuscan country cooking: handmade fresh pasta, grilled local meat, and seasonal, genuine ingredients. Signature dishes include ribollita, acquacotta, and pappardelle with wild boar ragù in winter, or pici with duck sauce and Val di Chiana “aglione” in warmer months. You can also stay over at the property itself: a 13th-century fortified village where Dante Alighieri sought refuge during his exile in 1304, later home to a 900-hectare sharecropping farm before falling into abandonment in the early 20th century. Since 1970, the Guicciardini Corsi Salviati family, now Neri and Elisa, has carefully restored the village’s stone houses, giving guests contemporary comfort within walls that still carry centuries of history.
Where to sleep
Fattorie Di Celli, poppi
In the Casentino countryside, Fattorie di Celli is a network of over 120 properties between suites, rustic Tuscan cottages, treehouses and bubble domes, spread across the estate and designed for every kind of stay, from fully catered to completely independent. Our favourite is Nuvola: a two-bedroom treehouse suspended in the forest canopy, with a kitchen, bathroom and floor-to-ceiling windows that put you directly inside the landscape.
Lo Chalet
Set in the Casentino hills, Lo Chalet spans two light-filled levels designed for authentic relaxation. Think a Finnish sauna facing Castello di Romena, a wood fireplace, and a terrace shaded by oaks and beeches for wine from the in-house cellar. Upstairs, a king-size bed sits beneath vaulted wooden beams, with automated blackout curtains revealing views over Romena and Porciano castles, plus a freestanding tub and private terrace.
Val di non, trentino
Did you know that Val di Non is the valley that produces more apples than anywhere else in Italy ? and in autumn, when the harvest is in full swing and the valley smells of pressed fruit and fresh must, it is a genuinely intoxicating place to be. But apples are only the beginning. The valley’s medieval castles, its extraordinary turquoise Lake Tovel, its ancient churches and its Nosiola wine make it one of the most attractive places to visit in Trentino.
What to do
You can’t come to Val di Non without visiting Lake Tovel, one of the most beautiful lakes we have in Trentino, with transparent waters reflecting the Dolomiti del Brenta and framed on every side by the golden-tinted forest. Continue to the Hermitage of San Romedio. You can leave the car at the Museo Retico di Sanzeno and follow the path carved directly into the rock of one of the valley’s most dramatic canyons, which leads to the hermitage. Finally, no itinerary in the Val di Non is complete without a visit to Castel Thun, which has dominated the valley from its hilltop for centuries. The seat of one of the region’s most powerful feudal dynasties, it retains its towers, walls and moat intact and inside, the rooms still furnished with original pieces, majolica stoves and paintings. As this is the largest apple producer in Italy, you can’t miss apple cider tasting during the harvest. We recommend Azienda Melchiori. An experience worth doing is also taking the Trenino del Gusto, a train connecting Trentino’s food and wine producers. Guided along the route through Val di Sole, Val di Non and the Piana Rotaliana, travelers sample local products, finger food and Trentino wines while visiting real working realities: MMape’s honey world in Croviana, Gusto Natura in Malé, the apple-growing Mondo Melinda in Val di Non, and finally the Rotari winery in Mezzocorona, home to Teroldego Rotaliano and sparkling Trentodoc.
Where to eat
Agritur Sandro, Sporminore
A family-run agriturismo at the entrance to the Val di Non, Agritur Sandro serves genuine Trentino tradition led by owner Tiziano and his brothers in the kitchen. The signature dish is tortel di patate, a beloved local potato fritter, served with mixed cured meats, cheeses, and carne salada, all made with quality ingredients from the family’s own farm. The estate also produces and sells its own wine, fruit, and cheese, rounding out a warm, unpretentious taste of the valley.
Il Falchetto, Sarnonico
Set deep in the forest, Hotel Il Falchetto has been run by the Nesler family for three generations, with brothers Franco and Dario now carrying on the kitchen’s traditions learned from Gina and “il Moro.” The signature dish is polenta, still cooked the old way in a large copper pot and served with stew, venison, mushrooms, or lucanica sausage with sauerkraut, alongside local specialties like gnocchi smalzadi and potato tortello — finished with Agnese’s homemade apple cake and berry crostata. In summer, the sunny terrace opens up sweeping views over the surrounding countryside.
Where to sleep
Pineta Nature Resort
Run with warmth by the Sicher family, Pineta Nature Resort is a wellness retreat tucked into the forests of the Val di Non, blending mountain chalets and small houses with an expansive spa center featuring an indoor pool, sauna and hot tub. Wellbeing here flows seamlessly from outdoor forest experiences to a panoramic relaxation area and infinity pool, all the way into the beauty-farm spa itself. Guests can also explore the valley through skiing, cycling, archery and yoga, before winding down over typical Trentino cuisine at the on-site restaurant.
Castel Fragsburg, Merano
A short drive from the Val di Non, this extraordinary castle hotel above Merano offers one of the most dramatic settings in Trentino: perched on a clifftop above the Adige valley, surrounded by forest, with views across to the Ortler group. In October, with the surrounding woodland turning gold and the heated pool steaming in the morning air, it is one of the finest places to be in northern Italy.
Nebrodi, Sicily
The Nebrodi is a vast protected mountain park running across the northern spine of Sicily, covering nearly 86,000 hectares of ancient beech forest, river gorges and some of the most biodiverse landscape in the Mediterranean, this is one of the few places in Sicily where the relationship between land, animal and human tradition has remained essentially unchanged for centuries. The cheeses, the salumi, the honey, the wild mushrooms, the semi-wild Nebrodi black pig roaming free beneath centuries-old oaks.
What to do
Drive the SS289 through the heart of the park, stopping at the towns along the ridge — Cesarò, San Fratello (famous for its Saracen horses, a breed that has roamed these mountains since the Norman era), Floresta (the highest village in Sicily, at 1,275 metres) and Randazzo, a medieval basalt city on the northern slopes of Etna that is one of the finest and least visited towns in the island. Seek out the Nebrodi black pig — suino nero dei Nebrodi — which roams the oak forests eating acorns and producing a salumi of extraordinary quality, available from small producers in Cesarò and the surrounding villages. And don’t leave without tasting the local manna — the extraordinary sweet sap harvested from ash trees in the Madonie and Nebrodi, used for centuries as a natural sweetener and sold in chunks at local markets.
Where to eat
Ristorante Nangalarruni, Castelbuono
On the western edge of the Nebrodi in the neighbouring Madonie park, Chef Giuseppe Carollo’s restaurant is the finest address in this part of Sicily: a deeply personal, deeply regional kitchen that takes the mountains’ mushrooms, game, cheeses and wild herbs and produces something completely original.
Where to sleep
Susafa, Polizzi Generosa
Susafa, at the foot of the Madonie mountains, is truly Sicilian and one of its best-kept secrets. Five generations of farming entrepreneurs have followed one another in this ancient masseria, until the last one transformed the spaces of a rural, working farm into a refined country retreat without altering the original charm of the structure. Taste the regional cuisine (take note of the sfincione and cannoli), learn the ABCs of traditional Sicilian cooking, have a fresh cherry granita on the terrace, relax in the design rooms and in the fruit-tree garden, and meet the wonderful host Manfredi and his lovely family. They will organize magical experiences, such as a private dinner in a wheatfield under the stars, in the deep silence of the countryside. Memories (and photos, of course) will be your souvenir.