Perched on Mount Pirchiriano, with the medieval towers cutting through the clouds and the snow-capped peaks of the Val di Susa in the background, the Sacra di San Michele took seventh place overall in the international ranking of Wiki Loves Monuments 2025. The shot is by Federico Milesi, a photographer who had already won the Italian national competition – and who with this image was selected from over 233,500 photographs from 56 countries around the world.
What is Wiki Loves Monuments
Wiki Loves Monuments is the largest photography competition in the world dedicated to cultural and architectural heritage. Organized every September by the Wikimedia Foundation community of volunteers, it allows anyone to participate by uploading their photographs of monuments to Wikimedia Commons — the large archive of free images that powers Wikipedia. Since its inaugural edition in 2010 in the Netherlands, the competition has collected over 3.6 million images from nearly 120,000 participants worldwide. In 2025, approximately 4,000 photographers contributed with over 233,500 shots. The operation is federated: each country organizes its own national selection, from which the ten best photographs are extracted to be submitted to the international jury, made up of photography and cultural heritage experts, who have the task of establishing the final global ranking.
The top ten of 2025: who won and who is in the rankings
At the top of the 2025 ranking is the shot by Hossein Pourakbarian, who portrayed the Dayir-e-Gachin caravanserai of Qomrud, in Iran:
Second place went to Darabad Andromeda with the Mehmandust tower, also in Iran:
The third to Arjunfotografer for an image of the Kusm Sarovar, on the Indian hill of Govardhan:
Other monuments in the ranking include the Palace of Ishak Pasha in Turkey, the Arak bazaar in Iran, the ruins of Luxor in Egypt, the church of San Clemente de Taüll in Catalonia, a Ukrainian church in Zaporozhye Oblast and a Confucian temple in China’s Yunnan.
In this international context, Milesi’s seventh place with the Sacra di San Michele is worth double: the image had already triumphed in the national competition, and to obtain that result it had already compared itself with over 26,000 photographs uploaded by over 500 Italian participants in the 2025 edition.
The complete ranking of the winners can be consulted directly on Wikimedia Commons.
