The Most Breathtaking Road Trips in Northern Italy

The Grande Strada delle Dolomiti

The Great Dolomites Road runs roughly 110 kilometres between Bolzano and Cortina d’Ampezzo, and it is one of the most arresting drives in the Alps. Built in the early 20th century and engineered with an ambition that still impresses today, it climbs through the Fassa and Livinallongo valleys before cresting the Pordoi Pass at 2,239 metres. Up here, the pale limestone towers rise in every direction and the scale of the landscape is genuinely hard to take in from behind a windscreen.

The road is at its best in September, when the summer crowds thin out, the larches begin to turn gold, and the light across the rock faces in the late afternoon is something close to extraordinary. Many travellers who drive it end up staying far longer than planned. The area has some of the finest dolomites hiking tours in Europe, and it’s easy to swap a half-day of driving for a half-day on the trails without losing any sense of the landscape. Cortina d’Ampezzo at the eastern end makes an excellent base for a night or two, with good food and an easy-going mountain town atmosphere that doesn’t feel overrun even in peak season.

The Lombardy Lakes Loop

A circular drive connecting Lakes Garda, Iseo, and Como gives you three completely different moods within a relatively compact area. Garda is wide and busy, popular with families and windsurfers from across northern Europe. Its southern shore is flat and fast; its northern tip narrows between steep cliffs and feels like a different lake entirely. Iseo is quieter and far less visited, with a slower pace and a genuinely local feel that the more famous lakes have largely lost. At its centre sits Monte Isola, a car-free island you reach by ferry from Sulzano — an easy and rewarding detour that most visitors to the region skip entirely.

Como is the most dramatic of the three. The hillsides drop almost vertically to the water, the villas along the western shore are some of the most photographed in Italy, and the corniche road above the lake — the SS340 — is one of those stretches where you find yourself pulling over every few kilometres simply because the view demands it. The drive between all three passes through Franciacorta, a wine-producing area often compared to Champagne, where stopping for a tasting at one of the estates along the road feels like the obvious thing to do.

“The roads here don’t take you from A to B. They take you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go.”

The Stelvio Pass and Val Venosta

The Stelvio Pass is one of the highest paved roads in the Alps, reaching 2,758 metres after 48 numbered hairpin bends on its eastern approach. It is dramatic in the way that only a handful of roads manage to be — the kind of drive that stays with you long after you’ve come back down to sea level. The pass connects South Tyrol with Lombardy and is open only between late spring and early autumn, so timing matters. Go too early in the season and you’ll find it closed or icy; go in July and you’ll share it with a steady stream of motorcyclists and cyclists who treat the climb as something of a pilgrimage.

Below the pass, the Val Venosta stretches west in near-total quiet. Apple orchards line the valley floor, small Romanesque churches appear in villages that seem barely touched by tourism, and the pace of life feels genuinely unhurried in a way that’s increasingly rare in the Italian Alps. It makes for a useful counterpoint to the intensity of the pass itself, and the combination of the two in a single day is hard to beat.

Piedmont’s Wine Roads

Not every great northern Italian road trip involves mountains. The Langhe hills of Piedmont, south of Turin, are UNESCO-listed wine country — a slow-rolling landscape of vineyards, hilltop villages, and truffle forests best explored without a fixed plan. The towns of Alba, Barolo, and La Morra are the natural anchors, each surrounded by producers of some of Italy’s most celebrated red wines. October is the ideal month, when the harvest brings the hills to life and the colours are at their peak. The roads here are quiet, the food is exceptional, and there is very little reason to hurry.

Practical Notes

Alpine passes including Stelvio and Pordoi are closed from roughly November to May, so summer and early autumn are the only realistic windows for the mountain routes. Italy’s toll motorways are fast but expensive — the smaller state roads are slower and far more interesting. If you’re driving into any city centre, check the ZTL restricted traffic zones carefully before you go. Fines arrive quietly weeks later and are rarely small. Beyond that, the main advice is simply to allow more time than you think you need. Northern Italy has a way of making plans irrelevant.