Top left: Trabocco Cungarelle - Vasto.
Top center: View from Vasto (CH), Abruzzo.
Top right: View from Agnone, Molise - looking west.
Bottom left: Spiaggia di Punta Aderci, Abruzzo.
Bottom center: Trabocco di Punta Aderci.
Bottom center: Trabocco di Punta Aderci.
Bottom right: Resti della chiesa di San Pietro - Vasto, Abruzzo.
We took a road trip to Abruzzo recently, choosing Vasto as a base for exploring the Costa dei Trabocchi. The plan, to the extent we had one, was mostly about the sea: trabocchi, swimming, some walking along the coast, a few towns, good lunches.
Four days later, the trip had settled into a rhythm we hadn't planned:
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna
Vasto became the hinge. One day we headed down toward the Adriatic. The next day we turned our backs on it and drove toward the Majella and the hill towns inland. Then back to the sea, then back to the mountains.
Anything roughly an hour from Vasto, sometimes a little more, was under consideration. That gave us a large piece of southern Abruzzo and, eventually, a bit of neighboring Molise.
A lot of the trip was based on feeling rather than a checklist. We didn't arrive with a need to see the highest peak or complete a famous trail. But almost from the start, the mountains rising behind the coast exerted a stronger pull than we expected. They were just there, always visible or implied, turning what we thought would be a coastal trip into something else.
The route was A4 east toward Verona, A22 south toward Modena, a short piece of the A1, and then the A14 down the Adriatic side of Italy. The Italian autostrada numbers are straightforward enough until European road numbers start appearing on signs as well. The A4 around Verona is also part of the E70; the A22 is part of the E45; and farther south the A14 becomes part of the E55. These European routes overlay the Italian road system, which can make a route look as if it is changing names when the asphalt underneath you has not changed at all.
This was a long drive, six to seven hours without getting too ambitious about stopping. We did stop at the Bauli Autogrill near Verona, which gets a mention here mainly because it has extremely clean bathrooms.
Later we got off the autostrada for lunch and a walk around Santarcangelo di Romagna before continuing south. (On the way back, our midpoint stop was Forlì.)
We had considered flying and taking the train. Both were perfectly possible. But because we don't own a car, a long drive is still something of a novelty for us. There is something pleasant about watching the geography change and talking while it does.
We pulled into Vasto at around 7 p.m. on a Sunday and found the historic center hopping. In fact, it may have been the most action we saw during our five nights there.
We stayed at BluOnlyHotel on Via Adriatica, a pedestrian street running along the eastern edge of the old town. Calling it a street almost undersells the location. It functions as a long balcony above the slope, with the Adriatic out in front of you and Vasto's historic center immediately behind.
One of the first things you notice walking along Via Adriatica is something that isn't there, the church of San Pietro.
Four days later, the trip had settled into a rhythm we hadn't planned:
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna
Vasto became the hinge. One day we headed down toward the Adriatic. The next day we turned our backs on it and drove toward the Majella and the hill towns inland. Then back to the sea, then back to the mountains.
Anything roughly an hour from Vasto, sometimes a little more, was under consideration. That gave us a large piece of southern Abruzzo and, eventually, a bit of neighboring Molise.
A lot of the trip was based on feeling rather than a checklist. We didn't arrive with a need to see the highest peak or complete a famous trail. But almost from the start, the mountains rising behind the coast exerted a stronger pull than we expected. They were just there, always visible or implied, turning what we thought would be a coastal trip into something else.
Logistics
We drove from Bergamo, about 675 kilometers each way. Imagine driving from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina and passing through six states and that is about the length of the trip one way.
The route was A4 east toward Verona, A22 south toward Modena, a short piece of the A1, and then the A14 down the Adriatic side of Italy. The Italian autostrada numbers are straightforward enough until European road numbers start appearing on signs as well. The A4 around Verona is also part of the E70; the A22 is part of the E45; and farther south the A14 becomes part of the E55. These European routes overlay the Italian road system, which can make a route look as if it is changing names when the asphalt underneath you has not changed at all.
- European Route E70 includes Autostrada A4 (Serennissima)
- European Route E45 includes Autostrada A22 (Brenner motorway)
- European Route E55 includes Autostrada 14 (Adriatic motorway)
This was a long drive, six to seven hours without getting too ambitious about stopping. We did stop at the Bauli Autogrill near Verona, which gets a mention here mainly because it has extremely clean bathrooms.
Later we got off the autostrada for lunch and a walk around Santarcangelo di Romagna before continuing south. (On the way back, our midpoint stop was Forlì.)
We had considered flying and taking the train. Both were perfectly possible. But because we don't own a car, a long drive is still something of a novelty for us. There is something pleasant about watching the geography change and talking while it does.
Vasto: the hinge
We pulled into Vasto at around 7 p.m. on a Sunday and found the historic center hopping. In fact, it may have been the most action we saw during our five nights there.
We stayed at BluOnlyHotel on Via Adriatica, a pedestrian street running along the eastern edge of the old town. Calling it a street almost undersells the location. It functions as a long balcony above the slope, with the Adriatic out in front of you and Vasto's historic center immediately behind.
One of the first things you notice walking along Via Adriatica is something that isn't there, the church of San Pietro.
The Resti della Chiesa di San Pietro consist largely of the surviving Romanesque portal and wall of a church that once stood among a whole row of buildings here. In 1956, a major landslide struck this side of Vasto. San Pietro was badly damaged, and the church was eventually demolished in 1959, leaving its façade as a kind of open-air memory of what had occupied the space before. The landslide began on February 22, 1956 and permanently altered this edge of the historic city.
Below Via Adriatica is the Parco Muro delle Lame, today partly occupied by sports facilities and paths dropping toward the sea. We initially wondered about the word lame. It isn't referring to blades. In parts of the central Apennines, lama was historically used for certain kinds of slope movement or landslide, which is appropriate here.
Standing on Via Adriatica that first evening, looking east, we felt we had chosen exactly the right place for exploring the coast.
What we didn't know yet was that we were, in a sense, facing the wrong way. Half of the trip would happen over our shoulders.
The first day was dedicated to the thing that had ostensibly brought us here: the Costa dei Trabocchi.
A trabocco is a wooden fishing structure built out over the sea and connected to land by a narrow walkway. Long arms extend from the platform and support a large net that can be lowered into the water and then raised when fish pass over it. The important point is that the fisherman can work from the structure without going out to sea in a boat.
There are many stories about the origin of the trabocchi and even about the origin of the word itself, so it is better not to be too definite about either. What is clear is their practical purpose. They offered coastal families a way to fish while avoiding some of the risks of taking a small boat onto the Adriatic. Over time they became one of the defining images of this part of Abruzzo, and today some have been converted into restaurants.
From Vasto we walked downhill through the Muro delle Lame area until we reached the former railway corridor, now part of the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi, the long cycling and walking route that follows the coast.
This was our first proper encounter with the coastline at walking speed. All told, from Vasto down to the Via Verde, north for a while and then back again, we covered only about seven kilometers. Bikes would have taken us much farther, but we were content to explore slowly.
And there was plenty to distract us.
Besides the trabocchi, along the shore there were enormous blocks filled with rounded pebbles that looked vaguely like deteriorating concrete. They weren't. They were natural conglomerate that had broken away from the geology above and landed on the beach looking suspiciously man-made.
Then there were the tall stands of cane growing beside the path. We started wondering about Arundo plinii and Arundo donax, particularly the latter, the giant cane we associate with coastlines, disturbed ground and marshy places. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
Below Via Adriatica is the Parco Muro delle Lame, today partly occupied by sports facilities and paths dropping toward the sea. We initially wondered about the word lame. It isn't referring to blades. In parts of the central Apennines, lama was historically used for certain kinds of slope movement or landslide, which is appropriate here.
Standing on Via Adriatica that first evening, looking east, we felt we had chosen exactly the right place for exploring the coast.
What we didn't know yet was that we were, in a sense, facing the wrong way. Half of the trip would happen over our shoulders.
Day 1: Mare
The first day was dedicated to the thing that had ostensibly brought us here: the Costa dei Trabocchi.
A trabocco is a wooden fishing structure built out over the sea and connected to land by a narrow walkway. Long arms extend from the platform and support a large net that can be lowered into the water and then raised when fish pass over it. The important point is that the fisherman can work from the structure without going out to sea in a boat.
There are many stories about the origin of the trabocchi and even about the origin of the word itself, so it is better not to be too definite about either. What is clear is their practical purpose. They offered coastal families a way to fish while avoiding some of the risks of taking a small boat onto the Adriatic. Over time they became one of the defining images of this part of Abruzzo, and today some have been converted into restaurants.
From Vasto we walked downhill through the Muro delle Lame area until we reached the former railway corridor, now part of the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi, the long cycling and walking route that follows the coast.
This was our first proper encounter with the coastline at walking speed. All told, from Vasto down to the Via Verde, north for a while and then back again, we covered only about seven kilometers. Bikes would have taken us much farther, but we were content to explore slowly.
And there was plenty to distract us.
Besides the trabocchi, along the shore there were enormous blocks filled with rounded pebbles that looked vaguely like deteriorating concrete. They weren't. They were natural conglomerate that had broken away from the geology above and landed on the beach looking suspiciously man-made.
Then there were the tall stands of cane growing beside the path. We started wondering about Arundo plinii and Arundo donax, particularly the latter, the giant cane we associate with coastlines, disturbed ground and marshy places. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
Interspersed among the cane grass were a few squirting cucumber - Ecballium elaterium.
And offshore were three structures we kept staring at. They turned out to be the Rospo Mare oil platforms, about eighteen kilometers east of Vasto and barely visible, along with the Alba Marina, the floating vessel used to store production from the field.
Conglomerate, cane grass, and oil platforms are the kind of things that can occupy us for quite a while.
For lunch we went to Trabocco Cungarelle, getting the full experience of walking along a narrow wooden passage to eat above the water on one of the structures we had spent the morning trying to understand from the land. The structure has some give, and even on a relatively calm day you can feel the structure sway slightly during our lunch.
Later we drove north to explore Punta Aderci, the large coastal reserve north of Vasto. It was odd to see rolling, manicured fields reaching down to the ocean. On the beaches, there were informal driftwood shelters that looked like teepees.
We didn’t swim at Punta Aderci, but headed back south toward Vasto and swam at Spiaggia di San Nicola, but it wasn't one of those swims that causes you to emerge from the water announcing that you have just discovered the Mediterranean for the first time. It was passable. Oddly, that informed our next day's journey.
By the end of the day, the coast hadn't exhausted our curiosity. Instead, it made us start wondering more about what lay behind it. And it was decided: that the next morning we would drive inland.
Day 2: Montagna
Our first stop on day 2 was Guardiagrele, at the foot of the Maiella. We had put it on the day's itinerary as a pleasant-looking town on the way toward the mountains. Instead, we ended up staying much longer than expected.
Guardiagrele has a long tradition of artisan work, particularly metalworking: wrought iron, copper and goldsmithing. It is associated with the medieval goldsmith Nicola da Guardiagrele, and those traditions are still part of the identity the town presents today.
We learned more about that not in a museum but through conversations we had during our day there.
We spoke for a long time with the widow of one of the town's last traditional copper workers. Then there was another long conversation connected with Pasticceria Palmerio and one of Guardiagrele's more famous contributions to Italian pastry.
This is one of the pleasures of travel that is impossible to schedule. You can schedule the duomo for 10:30, but you can't schedule talking with somebody for an hour because one question leads to another.
Somewhere along the way we also learned about Modesto Della Porta, born in Guardiagrele in 1885. He was a tailor by profession and a poet by inclination, writing in Abruzzese dialect about ordinary village life with humor, satire and a fair amount of melancholy. His 1933 collection Ta-pù, lu trumbone d'accumpagnamente: poesie in dialetto abruzzese (often formatted in standard Italian as Ta-pù, il trombone d'accompagnamento: poesie in dialetto abruzzese) made him an enduring local figure. The Italian word for trumpet is tromba, the title specifically uses trumbone (trombone) to emphasize a deeper, background instrument rather than the leading melody of a trumpet. The ta-pù referring to the bass notes or rhythmic thumping sound of a brass instrument playing an accompaniment part (like an "oom-pah" sound in a town band).
We like local heroes of this sort. The national canon of Garibaldi, Alighieri, and Gramsci have plenty of room elsewhere. When you arrive in a town and discover that one of the people it still celebrates was a tailor who wrote dialect poetry, you immediately know a little more about the place.
Lunch was at L’Osteria Romantino, a casual and satisfying affair. The day’s events conspired to have us have our dessert before lunch at Palmerio. Oh well.
The Guardiagrele specialty we had Palmerio is called le sise delle monache, literally "nuns' breasts." They are soft sponge cakes filled with pastry cream and covered in powdered sugar, traditionally formed into three rounded peaks. There are competing stories about both their invention and the name, as there should be with any pastry called nuns' breasts. What isn't disputed is their close association with Guardiagrele and with the Palmerio pastry tradition.
We then continued toward Pennapiedimonte. Or tried to.
For about half an hour we found ourselves stopped because the Giro d'Abruzzo was passing through the area. The 2026 race was being held September 15–18, and we had managed to intersect it on our mountain day.
There isn't much to do when a bicycle race has appropriated your road. You wait. You wait for the waves of support cars, police, and more support cars, wondering if the riders will ever pass. Then the helicopter signals their arrival. Everything passes and the quiet of the countryside returns.
Eventually we reached Pennapiedimonte with a very modest plan: park, walk to the Belvedere Balzolo, admire the view, and perhaps poke around a little.
The word balzo can describe a ledge, shelf or steep place on a mountainside, which is a good description of what happens here: the land suddenly opens into the deep valley of the Avello below you.
We were not planning a serious walk. We walked anyway.
One path led to another, and the terrain kept drawing us farther into the valley toward the Cascata del Macarone della Pila. By the time we returned to Pennapiedimonte, our quick look from the belvedere had turned into roughly 13 kilometers of hiking.
Beautiful and unexpected. Those might be the two words that best describe the day and, increasingly, the trip.
We had driven inland because the mountains looked interesting from Vasto. Instead, we got metalworking, dialect poetry, nuns' breasts, a bicycle race and a 13-kilometer walk we hadn't planned to take.
The sea was beginning to have competition.
After the previous day's unexpected hiking, we returned to the coast, although not immediately. We spent the morning in Vasto itself, including the Musei Civici di Palazzo d'Avalos.
Palazzo d'Avalos sits right at the edge of the old city facing the Adriatic. Its civic museums cover a surprising amount of ground: archaeology, paintings by the Palizzi family and others, contemporary art, historic costume, and the Neapolitan garden overlooking the sea. There was also a temporary exhibition, Mitografie Postmoderne, that pulled us rather unexpectedly into Italian painting from the 1980s to the present. The exhibit presented curated selection of works from major figures associated with Anachronism, pittura colta, and visionary realism spanning from the 1980s to today.
We have a weakness for civic museums. The best ones don't necessarily contain universally famous objects. Instead, they explain something about the place outside the museum doors.
Here the archaeology takes you backward beneath modern Vasto to Roman Histonium and earlier settlements, while the art collections pull you forward again into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a relatively small space, the town gets taken apart and put back together.
Nearby we went into Santa Maria Maggiore, where our attention was promptly diverted by an elegantly dressed skeleton. Why not?
Beneath the main altar is the body of San Cesario Martire, displayed in a glass case and dressed as a soldier-martyr. The church's own history says the relics were given to Cesare Michelangelo d'Avalos in 1695 and subsequently kept at Santa Maria Maggiore. The presentation belongs to the tradition of the corpi santi, relics from Roman catacombs that were dressed and displayed as early Christian martyrs. The visual certainty of the uniform is greater than what can actually be known about the biography of the person whose bones are inside it.
We went into the church expecting architecture and came out thinking about what happens to a person's identity several centuries after death. May our skeletons end up elegantly dressed in some church.
For lunch we went to Da Ferri, an Osterie d'Italia recommendation, and were not disappointed. We ordered one of the local specialties, brodetto alla vastese, or lu vrudatte in dialect. This is fish is cooked in an earthenware pot and, importantly, isn't stirred with utensils while cooking. You eat the fish first. Then, when what remains in the pot is mostly its intensely flavored tomato-and-seafood broth, the waiter arrives with spaghetti and drops it in. A lunch with a second act. We like.
Afterward this satisfying lunch, we continued north toward Fossacesia and the Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
The abbey occupies a spectacular promontory above the Adriatic. There was an early monastic presence here, with the abbey developing around the turn of the first millennium and becoming an important Benedictine center. The name in Venere is traditionally connected with a Roman sanctuary dedicated to Venus that once occupied the site, although no architectural remains of that temple survive.
The setting does much of the work. You have the Romanesque church, monastery and cloister, but beyond them the land simply drops away toward fields and the Adriatic. We stopped and enjoyed the breezes under the pines with a two shakertos in front of us.
It was another reminder that our coast and mountain categories weren't really separate. From the abbey you see both at once.
We ended the afternoon back at sea level, swimming at Spiaggia di Torricella. This swim was better. The beach was nearly empty, the water clearer than what we had found on our first coastal day, and we could swim around and look down at fish in the water. We were happy.
By now the pattern had established itself. Our first mountain day had not been an aberration. Given another free day, we again preferred to turn away from the sea.
This time we also broke the geographic premise of the post by leaving Abruzzo altogether and drove to Agnone, in Molise.
Agnone is famous for bells, specifically the Pontificia Fonderia Marinelli. The Marinelli foundry is described as the oldest bell foundry in Italy and one of the oldest in the world, with a bell-making tradition stretching back many centuries.
The word Pontificia is not just an advertising flourish. In 1924, Pope Pius XI granted the foundry the privilege of using the papal coat of arms. The museum and foundry visit is a good example of a subject that sounds specialized until someone explains it properly.
A traditional bell mold is built in layers. There is the inner core, the anima; then the falsa campana, a temporary full-size model of the future bell; then the outer mantello. Decorations and inscriptions are formed in wax. Eventually the false bell is destroyed, leaving the space into which the molten bronze is poured.
So you build a bell in order to destroy it so that you can make the bell. Got it? We approve of processes with this level of complication.
The tour also wandered into the larger history of bells, including the enormous Tsar Bell in Moscow, cast in the eighteenth century at more than 200 tonnes. It never rang. A fire and subsequent thermal shock caused a huge section to break away before the bell could ever be used.
Afterward we had lunch at Locanda Mammì, just outside Agnone. Chef Stefania Di Pasquo's restaurant has a Michelin star, but what we remember most was how naturally it seemed to belong where it was. We were sitting among the rolling hills and farms of Molise eating an eight-course menu built around ingredients from the same landscape.
The food was elegant without feeling precious, the portions generous enough that an eight-course lunch remained recognizably lunch.
So the day produced two discoveries: how bells are made, and that perhaps we had been underestimating Molise.
This is one of the pleasures of travel that is impossible to schedule. You can schedule the duomo for 10:30, but you can't schedule talking with somebody for an hour because one question leads to another.
Somewhere along the way we also learned about Modesto Della Porta, born in Guardiagrele in 1885. He was a tailor by profession and a poet by inclination, writing in Abruzzese dialect about ordinary village life with humor, satire and a fair amount of melancholy. His 1933 collection Ta-pù, lu trumbone d'accumpagnamente: poesie in dialetto abruzzese (often formatted in standard Italian as Ta-pù, il trombone d'accompagnamento: poesie in dialetto abruzzese) made him an enduring local figure. The Italian word for trumpet is tromba, the title specifically uses trumbone (trombone) to emphasize a deeper, background instrument rather than the leading melody of a trumpet. The ta-pù referring to the bass notes or rhythmic thumping sound of a brass instrument playing an accompaniment part (like an "oom-pah" sound in a town band).
We like local heroes of this sort. The national canon of Garibaldi, Alighieri, and Gramsci have plenty of room elsewhere. When you arrive in a town and discover that one of the people it still celebrates was a tailor who wrote dialect poetry, you immediately know a little more about the place.
Lunch was at L’Osteria Romantino, a casual and satisfying affair. The day’s events conspired to have us have our dessert before lunch at Palmerio. Oh well.
The Guardiagrele specialty we had Palmerio is called le sise delle monache, literally "nuns' breasts." They are soft sponge cakes filled with pastry cream and covered in powdered sugar, traditionally formed into three rounded peaks. There are competing stories about both their invention and the name, as there should be with any pastry called nuns' breasts. What isn't disputed is their close association with Guardiagrele and with the Palmerio pastry tradition.
We then continued toward Pennapiedimonte. Or tried to.
For about half an hour we found ourselves stopped because the Giro d'Abruzzo was passing through the area. The 2026 race was being held September 15–18, and we had managed to intersect it on our mountain day.
There isn't much to do when a bicycle race has appropriated your road. You wait. You wait for the waves of support cars, police, and more support cars, wondering if the riders will ever pass. Then the helicopter signals their arrival. Everything passes and the quiet of the countryside returns.
Eventually we reached Pennapiedimonte with a very modest plan: park, walk to the Belvedere Balzolo, admire the view, and perhaps poke around a little.
The word balzo can describe a ledge, shelf or steep place on a mountainside, which is a good description of what happens here: the land suddenly opens into the deep valley of the Avello below you.
We were not planning a serious walk. We walked anyway.
One path led to another, and the terrain kept drawing us farther into the valley toward the Cascata del Macarone della Pila. By the time we returned to Pennapiedimonte, our quick look from the belvedere had turned into roughly 13 kilometers of hiking.
Beautiful and unexpected. Those might be the two words that best describe the day and, increasingly, the trip.
We had driven inland because the mountains looked interesting from Vasto. Instead, we got metalworking, dialect poetry, nuns' breasts, a bicycle race and a 13-kilometer walk we hadn't planned to take.
The sea was beginning to have competition.
Day 3: Museo e mare
After the previous day's unexpected hiking, we returned to the coast, although not immediately. We spent the morning in Vasto itself, including the Musei Civici di Palazzo d'Avalos.
Palazzo d'Avalos sits right at the edge of the old city facing the Adriatic. Its civic museums cover a surprising amount of ground: archaeology, paintings by the Palizzi family and others, contemporary art, historic costume, and the Neapolitan garden overlooking the sea. There was also a temporary exhibition, Mitografie Postmoderne, that pulled us rather unexpectedly into Italian painting from the 1980s to the present. The exhibit presented curated selection of works from major figures associated with Anachronism, pittura colta, and visionary realism spanning from the 1980s to today.
We have a weakness for civic museums. The best ones don't necessarily contain universally famous objects. Instead, they explain something about the place outside the museum doors.
Here the archaeology takes you backward beneath modern Vasto to Roman Histonium and earlier settlements, while the art collections pull you forward again into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a relatively small space, the town gets taken apart and put back together.
Nearby we went into Santa Maria Maggiore, where our attention was promptly diverted by an elegantly dressed skeleton. Why not?
Beneath the main altar is the body of San Cesario Martire, displayed in a glass case and dressed as a soldier-martyr. The church's own history says the relics were given to Cesare Michelangelo d'Avalos in 1695 and subsequently kept at Santa Maria Maggiore. The presentation belongs to the tradition of the corpi santi, relics from Roman catacombs that were dressed and displayed as early Christian martyrs. The visual certainty of the uniform is greater than what can actually be known about the biography of the person whose bones are inside it.
We went into the church expecting architecture and came out thinking about what happens to a person's identity several centuries after death. May our skeletons end up elegantly dressed in some church.
For lunch we went to Da Ferri, an Osterie d'Italia recommendation, and were not disappointed. We ordered one of the local specialties, brodetto alla vastese, or lu vrudatte in dialect. This is fish is cooked in an earthenware pot and, importantly, isn't stirred with utensils while cooking. You eat the fish first. Then, when what remains in the pot is mostly its intensely flavored tomato-and-seafood broth, the waiter arrives with spaghetti and drops it in. A lunch with a second act. We like.
Afterward this satisfying lunch, we continued north toward Fossacesia and the Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
The abbey occupies a spectacular promontory above the Adriatic. There was an early monastic presence here, with the abbey developing around the turn of the first millennium and becoming an important Benedictine center. The name in Venere is traditionally connected with a Roman sanctuary dedicated to Venus that once occupied the site, although no architectural remains of that temple survive.
The setting does much of the work. You have the Romanesque church, monastery and cloister, but beyond them the land simply drops away toward fields and the Adriatic. We stopped and enjoyed the breezes under the pines with a two shakertos in front of us.
It was another reminder that our coast and mountain categories weren't really separate. From the abbey you see both at once.
We ended the afternoon back at sea level, swimming at Spiaggia di Torricella. This swim was better. The beach was nearly empty, the water clearer than what we had found on our first coastal day, and we could swim around and look down at fish in the water. We were happy.
Day 4: Montagna (Molise)
With one full day left, there was no debate about the direction. Inland it was.By now the pattern had established itself. Our first mountain day had not been an aberration. Given another free day, we again preferred to turn away from the sea.
This time we also broke the geographic premise of the post by leaving Abruzzo altogether and drove to Agnone, in Molise.
Agnone is famous for bells, specifically the Pontificia Fonderia Marinelli. The Marinelli foundry is described as the oldest bell foundry in Italy and one of the oldest in the world, with a bell-making tradition stretching back many centuries.
The word Pontificia is not just an advertising flourish. In 1924, Pope Pius XI granted the foundry the privilege of using the papal coat of arms. The museum and foundry visit is a good example of a subject that sounds specialized until someone explains it properly.
A traditional bell mold is built in layers. There is the inner core, the anima; then the falsa campana, a temporary full-size model of the future bell; then the outer mantello. Decorations and inscriptions are formed in wax. Eventually the false bell is destroyed, leaving the space into which the molten bronze is poured.
So you build a bell in order to destroy it so that you can make the bell. Got it? We approve of processes with this level of complication.
The tour also wandered into the larger history of bells, including the enormous Tsar Bell in Moscow, cast in the eighteenth century at more than 200 tonnes. It never rang. A fire and subsequent thermal shock caused a huge section to break away before the bell could ever be used.
Afterward we had lunch at Locanda Mammì, just outside Agnone. Chef Stefania Di Pasquo's restaurant has a Michelin star, but what we remember most was how naturally it seemed to belong where it was. We were sitting among the rolling hills and farms of Molise eating an eight-course menu built around ingredients from the same landscape.
The food was elegant without feeling precious, the portions generous enough that an eight-course lunch remained recognizably lunch.
So the day produced two discoveries: how bells are made, and that perhaps we had been underestimating Molise.
And then we drove back to Vasto. Again.
On the drive back, we thought of a man we met in Agnone. Wandering a backstreet to go see La Porta Storta, we met an old man, Constantino. For fifteen minutes he told us about the street we were standing on, in front of his house. The sculpture above the lintels and then invited us into his foyer to see a tribute to the Madonna and clearly proud to show off his house. He was slightly disappointed we didn't accept his offer to come up for coffee. Only fifteen minutes but such a strong image remained in our heads. And they say Il Molise non esiste (Molise doesn't exist). We think it very much is alive. (Abruzzi e Molise). It only became its own distinct, autonomous region in 1963, making it one of the youngest regional entities in the country.)
Each evening we returned to the same town, parked and walked Via Adriatica to our hotel. From Via Adriatica, the Adriatic was still in front of us. Below were the Muro delle Lame, the former railway line and the coast we had originally come to see.
Behind us were Guardiagrele, Pennapiedimonte, the Majella and, farther away, Agnone.
That was the surprise of the trip.
We hadn't discovered that the sea was disappointing or that the mountains were somehow "better." It was the proximity of the two that made the area interesting. A morning could begin in a town hanging above the Adriatic and end with us walking farther than intended into a mountain valley. The next day we could reverse direction and swim.
Vasto worked because it sat between those possibilities. We had chosen it as a base for the Costa dei Trabocchi. By the end, what we liked most was the hinge.
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna.
Then turn around and do it again.
.jpg "Squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium)")
Left: Natural conglomerate on the coast near Vasto.
Center: View from Spiaggia Toricella.
Right: Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.
Left: Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Center: View from Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Right: View from Agnone (Isernia), Molise.
Left: Guardiagrele - Bust of Modesto Della Porta.
On the drive back, we thought of a man we met in Agnone. Wandering a backstreet to go see La Porta Storta, we met an old man, Constantino. For fifteen minutes he told us about the street we were standing on, in front of his house. The sculpture above the lintels and then invited us into his foyer to see a tribute to the Madonna and clearly proud to show off his house. He was slightly disappointed we didn't accept his offer to come up for coffee. Only fifteen minutes but such a strong image remained in our heads. And they say Il Molise non esiste (Molise doesn't exist). We think it very much is alive. (Abruzzi e Molise). It only became its own distinct, autonomous region in 1963, making it one of the youngest regional entities in the country.)
Conclusion: Mare + Montagna
Behind us were Guardiagrele, Pennapiedimonte, the Majella and, farther away, Agnone.
That was the surprise of the trip.
We hadn't discovered that the sea was disappointing or that the mountains were somehow "better." It was the proximity of the two that made the area interesting. A morning could begin in a town hanging above the Adriatic and end with us walking farther than intended into a mountain valley. The next day we could reverse direction and swim.
Vasto worked because it sat between those possibilities. We had chosen it as a base for the Costa dei Trabocchi. By the end, what we liked most was the hinge.
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna.
Then turn around and do it again.
General Photos
.jpg "Squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium)")
Left: Arundo donax at Spiaggia di San Nicola, Vasto.
Center left: Arundo donax along the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.
Center left: Arundo donax along the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.
Right left: Arundo plinii at Punta Aderci.
Right: Squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium).
Right: Squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium).
Left: Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore - Vasto - San Cesario Martire
Center left: Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore - Vasto
Center right and Right: Co-Cathedral of Saint Joseph - Vasto
Center right and Right: Co-Cathedral of Saint Joseph - Vasto
Left: Natural conglomerate on the coast near Vasto.
Center: View from Spiaggia Toricella.
Right: Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.
Left: Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Center: View from Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Right: View from Agnone (Isernia), Molise.
Left: View from Vasto - night - looking toward Termoli.
Center: View from Vasto - day - looking toward Termoli.
Right: Resti della chiesa di San Pietro in Vasto.
Left: Trabocco Cungarelle from the coast.
Center: View from Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: One Rospo Mare platform and storage vessel 18 km from the coast.
Center: View from Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: One Rospo Mare platform and storage vessel 18 km from the coast.
Trabocco Cungarelle.
Left: Guardiagrele - Bust of Modesto Della Porta.
Center: Guardiagrele - Monumento Modesto Della Porta.
Right: Guardiagrele - Panorama dal Giardino della Villa Comunale.
Left: Tracks for hike from Pennapedimonte into Valle dell'Avello.
Center left: Walk from Vasto to explore Via Verde dei Trabocchi.
Center right: Palazzo d'Avalos - Giardino Napoletano - Vasto, Abruzzo.
Right: Palazzo D'Avalos - Mitografie Postmoderne Exhibit.
Center right: Palazzo d'Avalos - Giardino Napoletano - Vasto, Abruzzo.
Right: Palazzo D'Avalos - Mitografie Postmoderne Exhibit.
Food Photos
da Ferri (Vasto) dishes including appetizer and brodetto alla vastese.
Locanda Mammì - amuse-bouche and starter with trout.
Locanda Mammì - amuse-bouche and starter with trout.
Locanda Mammì - deer with peanut and plum sauce, risotto with nettle, and peanut dessert item.
Left and center: Dishes at Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: Le sise delle monache at Pasticceria Palmerio in Guardiagrele, Abruzzo.
Right: Le sise delle monache at Pasticceria Palmerio in Guardiagrele, Abruzzo.
