Riparbella is not only about nature. It is a town that tells its story through the art spread across its squares, the contemporary craftsmanship of its workshops and the memory held in its architecture.
Anyone who comes to Riparbella for the hills and the trails soon discovers that the town has a great deal more to show. Among the alleyways of the old town art has become part of the everyday landscape: murals, painted frames, painted benches.
Then there are the places that speak of a very particular identity: a niche perfumery that came from New York and chose this town as its home, and a monumental cemetery that is, to all intents and purposes, a work of art and a national monument.
And then there is the town itself, square by square : the sixteenth-century oratories, the parish church, the medieval streets, the springs beneath the paving, the monuments of remembrance.
A medieval hilltop town stretched along a ridge of white tufa at 216 m above sea level, in the province of Pisa, between the Val di Cecina and the Etruscan Coast. It grows in a line along the ridge — not on a circular plan like the neighbouring towns — with 13 murals in the old town, nine wineries in the countryside and around 65 km of green trails.
| By car | Exit at Cecina Nord on the SS1 Aurelia / Variante Aurelia, then SP 13 del Commercio . Cecina 10 km (15′) · Livorno 50 km (45′) · Pisa 65 km (55′) · Volterra 35 km (40′) · Florence 130 km (1h 45′). |
| By train | The nearest useful station is Cecina , on the Pisa–Rome Tyrrhenian line; from there you continue by bus, taxi or hire car. The Cecina–Saline di Volterra railway is not in service and is replaced by buses: the San Martino stop is therefore not a useful arrival point. |
| By bus | Riparbella is served by regional bus routes with their terminus in Cecina: up-to-date timetables and stops at at-bus.it. |
| By bike | Anello del Vino : 42 km and around 1,000 m of ascent taking in the nine wineries. Bike racks in the old town and e-bike charging points. |
You can walk across the town in a few minutes: leave the car in one of the car parks along the ridge. On the map they are marked with the letters A–I from south to north, and every card has a direct link to Google Maps.
There are 13 so far : every year, on the last weekend in September , the festival La Collina delle Fiabe adds new ones. They are painted by international artists working with residents and with the owners of the walls, and each one tells a story about Riparbella or is connected to the town in some way. You can see them all on foot in half an hour, all in the old town, along with the twenty hand-painted artist benches .
The project was started in 2018 by the municipal administration with the association StArt Attitude and funding from the GAL Etruria, with the idea of turning the town into an open-air contemporary art museum. You can follow the route on your own with the map from the tourist office, or join a guided tour led by volunteers.
Tourist office / Town Hall
Piazza del Popolo 1 · 0586 697111
Municipal pharmacy
Piazza Matteotti
Carabinieri
Riparbella, north side
Tourism portal
visitriparbella.com
| 25–26 April | Pianeta Ripa |
| May | Ripa Fiorita — flowers and tradition. From May, Via di Piazzetta becomes the street of coloured umbrellas |
| 24 June | Night of San Giovanni |
| July | Ripa Wine — wine and music |
| early August | Agrifiera |
| late August | RipaTalent |
| last weekend in September | La Collina delle Fiabe — street art festival: the new murals are created |
| November | Sagra del Cinghiale wild boar festival · Festival of Tradition and New Olive Oil |
| December – January | RipaChristmas and the Mechanical Nativity Scene |
Content from the Riparbella tourist office and the portal visitriparbella.com, data from the BiciInComune app and base mapping by OpenStreetMap. The car park locations are those given by the tourist office. Some points in the centre have a position estimated along the street from the house number: their card says so.
An interactive map, opened on the places to see. Tap a marker for its card, the distance from the centre and directions in Google Maps; with the filters at the top you can switch to the murals, the wineries, the car parks and the trails. The scroll wheel zooms after a click inside the map, so the page scrolls normally.
Walking through the old town you come across some twenty painted benches , each one dedicated to a masterpiece of painting. Together they form a learning trail through the history of art: from Impressionism to the avant-gardes of the twentieth century and on to more recent masters.
They grew out of the project “La Collina delle Fiabe” , carried out with the help of the town’s schoolchildren and unveiled in 2023. You will find them in Piazza Monumento ai Caduti, along Via Roma, in Piazza della Madonna and in the park of San Rocchino: free to enjoy at any time.
The project was carried out by the Municipality of Riparbella together with the artist Vinci (Vincenzo Marano Esposito) and the pupils of the In Natura state middle school in Riparbella. Guided by their teacher Giuseppe Mercurio and by Vinci himself, the students explored the main movements in the history of art and produced the sketches that the artist then transferred onto the benches, creating a genuine open-air trail. Each bench carries a caption telling the story of the work and the artist it represents, including the lesser known ones: a way of bringing street furniture, study and community together.
A niche perfume boutique founded in Hudson, New York State, and moved to Riparbella with a motto that says it all: “Born in New York. reMade in Italy”. It was created by the perfumers Christopher Draghi and Robert Dobay, who chose to go against the grain of the more commercial destinations.
The studio occupies the ground floor of an elegant eighteenth-century Tuscan townhouse : thousands of bottles of raw materials, steel workbenches and a rare glimpse into the perfumer’s craft. The fragrances, all unisex, carry names in Native American languages and are joined by hand-poured candles and diffusers in the studio’s signature ten-sided glass with the word “adage” in relief.
The space is open to visitors and you can buy on site; on request you can join workshops , from making scented candles to an introduction to the art of perfumery.
Just outside the town, along the road towards Castellina, is one of the most moving places in Riparbella: the Bellincioni monumental cemetery , declared a national monument in 1989. It is an early work by the architect Luigi Bellincioni, designed in 1884 and completed in 1894.
The doorway on the façade echoes the shape of the jambs of Etruscan tombs and is crowned by the Florentine lily with two torches pointing downwards, an ancient Etruscan symbol of death. Beyond the entrance opens a majestic neoclassical portico that embraces the burial ground in a semicircle.
The work was left unfinished — in the design the arcades were meant to close the full circle — and it is precisely those open sides that give it an atmosphere of rare spirituality. Under the portico, opposite the entrance, stands the chapel, which takes up the motif of the Etruscan jambs; on either side are the mortuary chambers, the municipal niches and the chapels of the town’s most influential families. Trail no. 1 also passes by, “Ripa Bella”.
A building site that lasted thirty years, begun in 1887 and never truly finished, and in recent years the subject of a restoration programme funded by the Tuscany Region. The full story is in the page devoted to it.
In Piazza del Popolo, since 8 March 2025 the municipal library has also been a museum: its rooms are home to C’ERA — Centro Espositivo Riparbella Antica , whose name is an acronym of Cultura, Esperienza, Ricerca, Archeologia (culture, experience, research, archaeology).
It displays some fifty Etruscan finds from the site of Belora , the ancient settlement of the Volterra area above the river Cecina, and above all the Hellenistic gold funerary crown, reassembled by the Superintendency almost forty years after its discovery and shown here for the first time.
The library, run by the Microstoria cooperative, is part of the Bibliolandia network and offers book loans, support for students, educational workshops and free courses for residents. Museum and library share the same opening hours, which change with the seasons.
Thirteen stops inside the old town, in walking order: you start from Piazza della Madonna and go down as far as the park of San Rocco. At the end, two places that lie outside the town. Every place has its own page, with the full story.
In the former oratory of the Compagnia della SS. Annunziata, built in 1502, Riparbella’s mechanical nativity scene is on display: around 80 square metres of biblical landscape with more than 140 figures moved by electronic mechanisms, hand-made by the townspeople, who add some new detail every year.
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Built in 1542, it has a gabled façade in plastered stone and a bell gable with a bell bearing the date 1507. Inside, on the nineteenth-century altar, is an old fresco of the Madonna delle Grazie.
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A bronze monument dedicated to the fallen of the First World War, with a commemorative plaque for those of the Second as well, by the sculptor Ezio Ceccarelli. From the square there is a beautiful view towards the sea.
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On 25 June 1944, at the Le Marie farm, seven people were killed by men of the Reichsführer-SS. Riparbella has dedicated to them a Parco della Memoria in Via Roma , with a monument by the sculptor Ferdinando Cerri, and a memorial stone on the site of the massacre.
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Probably the oldest core of the town : around the sixteenth century the “castle” of Riparbella was nothing other than the Borgo. The houses along this street belonged to the Baldasserini family, with an olive mill attached.
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Built around 1866 to give the municipal archive and council meetings a home at last, as they had been held in private houses. A few small hovels stood on the site and were pulled down for the purpose; the square’s clock was moved onto the little tower of the building.
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The town centre, with its main spring. Beneath the paving lie the remains of the great cistern of 1636 , built at the behest of the Marquis Carlotti: of the old spring the three spouts survive, and water still runs from them.
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A cluster of houses already inhabited in the fifteenth century, which grew up around the church and outside the castle. Traces of its history survive in the medieval streets , with external staircases and underground passages.
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The church of the patron saint. The present one was built in 1841 by Grand Duke Leopoldo II in place of the old San Michele, of which only a stretch of wall survives between the bell tower and the left side. The bell tower dates from 1622.
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One of the hamlets outside the castle, documented in the State Archive since the seventeenth century: twelve houses starting from Via della Noce. Today the square is home to the old eighteenth-century tower clock.
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Created around the second half of the nineteenth century and named after the scion of one of the Pisan families with property in the town. Today it holds a raised garden bed tended by resident volunteers and has become the symbol of the “Adotta Riparbella” project.
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Where the SP 13 forks towards Castellina Marittima there still stands a tabernacle dedicated to San Rocco, protector against the plague , today frescoed with a painting of the saint with his dog, by Vincenzo Marano Esposito.
Discover the placeOn the hill above the river Cecina stood an Etruscan settlement founded by Volterra, excavated in the nineteenth century and again in 1986. The site cannot be visited : the finds, and the golden crown, can be seen at C’ERA in the library.
See the finds at C’ERA
«A hilltop town where art, crafts and memory
sit together as naturally as the landscape itself.
»
You can walk round them in half an hour, along with the artist benches between Piazza Monumento ai Caduti, Via Roma, Piazza della Madonna and the park of San Rocchino. Always open, free admission. The mechanical nativity scene can be visited over the Christmas period.
Via XX Settembre 36. Open every day ; visits and purchases on site, workshops on request. Info: ciao@sourceadage.it.
At the entrance to the town on the Castellina side, on Via del Commercio. Accessible during the cemetery’s opening hours.
Piazza del Popolo. Maps of the murals, guided tours and information about the trails. Saturday 3.30–5.30pm, Sunday 11am–12.30pm and 3.30–5.30pm. Tel. 333 1691023.
Seasonal opening hours, free admission. Tel. 0586 696052. The up-to-date calendar is on Bibliolandia.
It can be visited over the Christmas period: it traditionally opens on the evening of 24 December and stays up until the beginning of February.
Piazza del Popolo 1. Tel. 0586 697111. Offices and home of the municipal archive.
