Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.
There is a window in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola where you can sit for an entire afternoon, looking down the long straight street a cardinal cut through the middle of the town, knocking down whatever stood in the way so his guests could arrive at his door in a proper procession. We did exactly that on a Saturday in July. In the whole building, a palace good enough to stand in for the Vatican in a Hollywood film, there were maybe ten people, including us.
That afternoon is Tuscia. It is the country north of Rome: the province of Viterbo and the old Etruscan coast, a volcanic plateau of soft tuff, crater lakes and hazelnut groves that was a civilization before Rome was a village of huts. Rome took it twice. First came the legions, one Etruscan city at a time, until the people who had given Rome its kings, its arches and its gladiators simply became Romans. Then came the Popes, who ran it for centuries as the Church’s farm, building palaces for cardinals and leaving everyone else in simple houses. Both conquests left the same thing behind: a land full of extraordinary things with almost nobody looking at them.
We lived in Rome for a year and came up here more often than anywhere else. Ronciglione is where the idea behind this publication was born. This Guide is the map of the first patch of Italy we found for ourselves.
In a nutshell aka TLDR
This is not Tuscany, and that is the point. Drive down from Florence through the Val d’Orcia and the Maremma, and everything is in order: villas, estates, farms, a nine out of ten on any aesthetic chart. Cross into Tuscia and you drop four or five points within an hour. Centuries of Papal rule explain why. Expect working towns, rough edges, and a few ugly post-war blocks. In return you get places nobody performs for.
There is nothing to do, and that is what you came for. Ronciglione has a gate, a cathedral, and two or three main streets. Capranica has maybe ten streets and an old town. Most of these towns have one sight, or none. The day goes to a coffee table on the main square, a walk along the walls after dark, and watching the whole town head home for lunch at 12:30.
The sights are empty. The Villa Farnese, a palace that rivals the Vatican, had ten people in it on a July Saturday. At the Monster Park in Bomarzo, we were the only visitors. The Etruscan cemeteries at Tarquinia and Cerveteri are the Italian answer to the Pyramids, and most people driving to Rome pass them without stopping.
Bring a car and some Italian. These towns sit on tuff ridges off the Via Cassia and the lake roads. We did all of it by car, and I would not try it any other way. Almost no foreigners come here. When we tried to order a pizza in Capranica, it took an American stranger to rescue us. Bomarzo’s garden isn’t even signposted from the village.
Everything is close. Caprarola, Ronciglione and Capranica cluster around Lake Vico, a short drive from each other. Viterbo is the city of the region, with Bomarzo twenty minutes east. The coast, with Tarquinia and Cerveteri, is your road back to Rome. Stay a week, sleep in one bed, and do the rest as day trips.
The easy win: Ronciglione. It’s where we slept, again and again.
Where to base yourself
Ronciglione. This is where it started for us. We came for a romantic weekend in 2021, canceled whatever we had planned next to come back for two more weeks, and returned a year later for my birthday. It is fifteen minutes from Caprarola, Lake Vico sits right below it, and every other place in this Guide is a day trip away. Paola’s estate, Relais Villa Lina, is bookable and has the pool.
Ronciglione | Baptism into the Other Italy
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.
The places not to miss
Caprarola and the Villa Farnese. A pentagonal palace at the top of a town that was demolished and rebuilt to serve as its driveway. The Farnese story, from a Pope’s mistress to a fourteen-year-old cardinal, runs through half of this Guide, and this is where it was built in stone. Give it a full day. The garden behind the villa is a trip on its own, and the interiors doubled for the Vatican in The Two Popes.
Lake Vico. The volcanic crater the whole corner circles around, ten minutes below Caprarola. There is a beach, and there are restaurants built out on piers at the water’s edge. Go for a late dinner and watch the sun go down over the lake.
Capranica. A medieval town on a tuff ridge above the Via Cassia, and our first real small town in Italy. It has nothing to see except itself after dark, when it goes back to being the village it was five hundred years ago. It is also a stop on the Via Francigena, the pilgrim road from Canterbury to Rome that gets a fraction of the Camino’s walkers. Park on the Cassia below, buy a pizza, and sit on the walls.
Viterbo and Bomarzo. Viterbo is where the popes ran the Church for a couple of decades in the thirteenth century, when Rome would not have them. Its San Pellegrino quarter is the largest intact thirteenth-century district in Europe. The city also took heavy Allied bombing, and the post-war blocks dropped into its medieval streets are part of the visit. Twenty minutes east is the Sacred Grove of Bomarzo: a private, barely signposted wood full of giant stone monsters, built by a soldier for his dead wife.
Tarquinia and Cerveteri. The Etruscan coast, on the road down to Rome. Almost nothing is left of these two cities except their cemeteries. The Etruscans built their houses from wood and mud and their tombs from stone, and the tombs are why you come. The coast itself is flat and, honestly, a bit boring. The necropolises and their museums are not. Cerveteri also works as a day trip from Rome.
Tarquinia and Cerveteri | Who the hell are the etruscans?!
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
Tuscia’s food
Tuscia has no dish the world can name, and I am not going to borrow one from Rome. What it has is quieter.
Hazelnuts. Between every two towns around Lake Vico, the roads run through endless hazelnut groves. This is the Nocciola Romana DOP, and a big share of it goes north to Ferrero in Piedmont. Tuscia grows the nut and Piedmont gets the name. Very Papal States of it.
France’s oldest wine. The Etruscans shipped wine and vines to Lattara on the coast of Gaul, which is the oldest winemaking evidence in France. The full story, and the French humiliation, is in the Tarquinia piece.
Coming from Tuscany
Most people cross Tuscia by accident, on the drive from Florence to Rome. The Tuscan half of that drive has its own Guide.
Guide | Tuscan Mainland
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.
The final note
This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on Tuscia goes up.
Everything in here is a place I have been to personally. I don’t write about restaurants I haven’t eaten at or towns I haven’t walked through. If a place is in this guide, it’s because I went, ate, learned something, and decided it was worth your time. Tuscia is where I learned that rule. Ronciglione was on no list, and it changed how we travel.
Guide last updated: 24 September 2026
