Five Italian Towns With Sea And Mountains Under An Hour Away

If you’ve spent any time looking for Italian towns, you’ll know the usual trade-off: you get the sea, or you get the mountains, and getting both usually means a long drive between them. We went looking for the exceptions – towns where sea and mountains in Italy are genuinely both close enough to do on the same day, not just once a summer. Using our own Town Explorer data, we picked out five: Fano, Giarre, Spoltore, Santarcangelo di Romagna and Tortona. Different regions, different budgets, same basic idea – swim in the morning, walk in the hills by the afternoon, home for dinner. FIND OUT WHICH ITALIAN CITY IS RIGHT FOR YOU 1. Fano Fano sits on the Adriatic coast in the Marche, and it’s famous for a few different things: the Roman influence you can still see in the streets, the Arco di Augusto, which still marks the old gateway into the historic centre, one of the oldest carnivals in Italy (running since the 1600s), and the sea, which has always tied its residents to the town. Basically, it’s the kind of place where you feel a bit on holiday all year round. The sea is right in town,...