These 10 spaghetti westerns have been considered the best by the British

The British association BFI has included them in a list of 10 Italian Westerns not to be missed

Esquire

By Giuseppi Giordano

3/5/2026

Probably there would not have been a Spaghetti Western without Sergio Leone. It is unclear how many films with cowboys on the border had been made in Italy before 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, excluding parodies, Duel in Texas and Bullets Don’t Argue, which to be precise was shot together with Leone’s film, a strategy of the producers to amortize costs. The fact is that after the release of the film with Clint Eastwood, the western would never be the same again: it had been a dress rehearsal for western a revolution in the genre, projected into a fairytale and at the same time cynically ironic dimension, with the gunslinger – a marginal character until then – placed at the center of the story. Those in Leone’s films were laconic figures, both in the sense of greedy for words and in the sense of an unknown past, but they were capable, while killing for money, of endangering their lives for a good cause. This prototype was the starting point of subsequent Spaghetti Westerns and some American films that understood the need to change, even if only by adopting the dusty aesthetics of these small Italian films full of ideas.

A list of ten great Spaghetti Westerns drawn up by the British Film Institute (BFI), the British association for the promotion and preservation of films, gives us a measure of the international success of the Italian variant of the western.

We publish it in full below. How many have you seen?

Italian Westerns, these 10 were also like in the UK

*The Dollar Trilogy  (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 1964-1966), by Sergio Leone

*The Return of Ringo (1965) by Duccio Tessari

*Django (1966) by Sergio Corbucci

*Bullet for the General? (1967) by Damiano Damiani

*Death Rides a Horse (1967) by Giulio Petroni

*Day of Anger (1967) by Tonino Valerii

*Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone

*The Great Silence (1968) by Sergio Corbucci

*Sabata (1969) by Gianfranco Parolini

*They Call Me Trinity (1970) by Enzo Barboni