LEGO Ideas and CUUSOO

Italian Riviera

A postcard-perfect slice of Cinque Terre with a price tag to match.

4.4/5

Set 21359 · 2025

Pieces3,252

Minifigs10

Year2025

Set number21359

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The verdict

This is one of the prettiest display sets LEGO has made in a while, with interiors Brickset reckons beat some of the Modular Buildings.

The catch is the $299.99 price, which nearly every reviewer flagged as steep for around 3,250 pieces. Grab it if you love the Italian coast or want a proper 360-degree centrepiece with real charm. Wait for a discount if you're chasing the best pieces-per-dollar value.

Best for: Display builders who love European travel and richly detailed interiors

The full review

What it is

Let's talk about the Italian Riviera, because this LEGO® set might be the loveliest thing to come out of the Ideas line in a while. It's based on Alex Sahli's fan design of a Cinque Terre style fishing village, and it absolutely nails that idyllic Euro summer feeling. You get three pastel buildings stacked up a rocky cliff (a gelateria, a diving equipment shop, and a fishmonger's) with the shopkeepers' homes sitting above them. Lift off the roofs and upper floors and you're looking at some of the most detailed interiors LEGO has ever done, and reviewers keep saying they edge out the Modular Buildings in places. Add window boxes, retro rooftop antennas, washing lines, and textured cliffs, and the whole thing genuinely looks like a postcard come to life.

The catch

Now the honest bit, because you're my mate and I won't pretend otherwise. The complaints are consistent across reviews, and they mostly come down to money. At $299.99 in the US the price works out to about 9.2 cents a piece, and Jay's Brick Blog argued it feels closer to a $250 set, pointing at Tudor Corner's 3,266 pieces for $230 as the awkward comparison. Brickset agreed the price seems expensive, particularly in the States. There are smaller gripes too. The finished model sits on an island-style base with no connection points, so it can't dock with modulars. The moving shutters from the original Ideas project became fixed panels in the final set, and the restaurant's lace tablecloth is a sticker rather than a printed or fabric piece. None of these ruin it, but they sting at this price.

Who it's for

So who's this for? If you've wandered the Ligurian coast, have Italian roots, or just want a warm, sun-washed centrepiece that looks finished from every side, this is an easy set to fall for, and the 4.4 out of 5 community rating on Brickset backs that up. The interiors reward anyone who likes peering into little rooms, arguably more than most modulars do, and the build itself is approachable and very modular-esque, so it's friendly if you're stepping up from smaller sets. If you're value-driven, though, there are bigger and cheaper builds competing for the same cash, and I'd tell you to watch for a sale. My take: a genuinely gorgeous build and display piece that's about $50 too expensive at full price.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this one is a relaxed, rewarding job spread across 25 numbered bags, and it never really drags. You start with an asymmetrical rocky base and cobblestone paths, then raise the three colourful buildings one at a time before capping everything with terracotta roof tiles. It leans modular-esque in feel, with plenty of subtly clever techniques tucked in rather than one showy party trick, and the instructions even flag a point where two people can split the work. The standout section is the cliffs, built up in separate textured chunks so the rock face looks natural instead of a flat grey wall. Because each floor lifts off, the interior detailing (Nonna's kitchen, the shop counters, the tiny apartments) gets baked in as you go rather than bolted on at the end.

On the parts front there's real substance. LEGO introduced twelve recoloured elements for this set, including reddish orange bricks in a bunch of configurations and dark green door pieces, exactly the kind of thing that makes builders and MOC-ers happy because those warm colours travel well beyond this model. You also get a generous 111 spare parts on top of the 3,252, which is always welcome. The count skews toward smaller detail parts, plants, tiles, and cheese slopes for the roofs and cliffs, so the value story is less about big showpiece bricks and more about a deep, varied coastal parts pool. If you build your own creations, that Ligurian colour palette alone makes the bags worth digging through.

Fun facts

01It's the 67th LEGO Ideas set, refined from a fan project by Alex Sahli, whose own minifigure appears as the tourist holding a camera.
02The design draws on Cinque Terre in Liguria, the famous cluster of colourful cliffside fishing villages on Italy's northwest coast.
03In the studio apartment there's a watercolour of a Tuscan Villa, a nod to Sahli's other Ideas project that hit 10,000 votes but never became a set.
04One of the ten minifigs is a kitten caught eating a stolen fish in the alleyway, the kind of tiny storytelling most sets wouldn't bother with.