Discover Sulmona

Sulmona lies at about 400 metres in the Valle Peligna, a flat basin in the province of L'Aquila, ringed on every side by mountains and with roughly twenty-three thousand inhabitants.

Its centre is organised around Piazza Garibaldi, an enormous open square with a thirteenth-century aqueduct running along one edge, and around Corso Ovidio, the single long street that crosses the old town from end to end.

The set piece is the Complesso della Santissima Annunziata, where a Gothic portal, a Renaissance window and a Baroque church front sit side by side on one facade — the record of three building campaigns and one earthquake.

The town is the historic centre of Italian confetti, the sugared almonds, and the Pelino works on the edge of the centre keeps a museum of the trade.

Above the town, on the flank of Monte Morrone, stand a Roman sanctuary of Hercules and the hermitage where the man who became Pope Celestine V lived before he was elected.

Sulmona is also a rail junction, which in this part of the Apennines is unusual and useful.