I'm planning to go to Italy and would like some suggestions for smaller cities to visit that are more off the beaten path.

What are your interests? There are dozens of small cities in Italy that are visited by relatively few tourists.

A former New York Times Rome correspondent even wrote a book about them called "Cento Citta," or "A Hundred Towns."

Mostly I would like places with interesting architecture (moreso than art) and that's fairly lively and colorful.

Hi dcappolino. Is there any certain part of Italy that especially interest you? When do you plan on travelling to Italy. When you say smaller cities about population wise what are you thinking of? Or are you actually referring to little small towns/villages. Will you be renting a car to get around Italy? Oh, how long to you plan on staying in Italy?

Probably central to northern Italy would be of most interest. Would either travel in May or Sep 2006.

LoveItaly has already asked some of the questions I should have asked, but where are you already going? (Venice, I think, but I don't think I've seen an itinerary.) It's not going to be any help to you to suggest a town in Sicily if you are only staying north of Rome...

How many smaller towns? How many days do you have for the smaller towns?

dcappolino,
We loved Le Marche which has wonderful historic towns like Urbino...we drove down from Padua but didn't make it out to the coast. The NY Times did a travel section cover story on the area a few weeks ago...and horrors they featured our favourite small hotel!

Hi dcappolino, it is kind of hard to answer your questions as you don't really give out information. So I give up! Have a great trip.

In northern or north-central Italy (depending how you draw the "north" and "central" lines), an unusual small town that I think you would like is Dozza. It's in Emilia-Romagna right near Imola. All the walls of the town are covered with murals. Periodically there is a mural contest that attracts artists from all over Italy and from foreign countries.

In northern Italy you might like Vigevano, which is in the province of Pavia. It's not exactly off the beaten track, because it's a lively commercial center for the fashion shoe industry and because there's a lot of local tourism, but it's not heavily visited by foreign tourists. There's an extremely beautiful and impressive main square that's full of people strolling or standing around chatting or sitting and having coffee or gelato.

Bergamo, in northern Italy, is not exactly off the beaten path, but a lot of people miss it when they're just arriving or departing through Milan. It's about an hour or less from Milan and extremely beautiful. Given your stated preferences, I think you'd love it.

The above are all in northern Italy. Central Italy is full of wonderful small towns that you could probably just go "somewhere" and wing it, taking daytrips to surrounding towns that would most likely appeal to you. If you stayed somewhere in Umbria and took day trips, you would have so many choices.

P.S. to my post above: Bergamo and Vigevano are accessible by train, but I don't know how accessible Dozza is by public transportation. Maybe there's a bus there from Bologna. I went to Dozza with a friend who drove, but went to the other two cities by train. Vigevano and Bergamo are small cities, while I think Dozza would be considered a town.

Original poster never came back to check for answers?