Molise Region Guide

Molise is for travellers who actively want the absence of other travellers. That is the honest case, and it is a real one.

• Saepinum. A small Roman town near Sepino with its walls, gates, forum, basilica and theatre standing — and, unusually, no ticket office, no barriers and often nobody else. A farming hamlet grew inside it, so houses sit among the columns.
• The tratturi. Grass droving roads up to 111 m wide, used for transhumance since antiquity, running from Abruzzo down into Puglia. Transhumance went onto UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2019, and the routes are walkable.
• Deep prehistory.La Pineta at Isernia is one of the oldest known human settlement sites in Europe, with stone tools and butchered animal bone around 600,000-700,000 years old, and a museum built over the excavation.
• Samnite sites.Pietrabbondante is a theatre-and-temple sanctuary of the people who fought Rome to a standstill, set on a ridge with a view across most of the region.
• Living craft. The Marinelli bell foundry at Agnone has cast bells since about the year 1000 and holds a papal warrant — among the oldest continuously operating family businesses anywhere.

What it is not: a region with a famous set-piece, a developed tourist infrastructure, or much English spoken inland. Expect to organise things yourself.

Molise is small enough to cross in under two hours, which makes a single base workable.

The Roman and Samnite sites

Saepinum near Sepino is the highlight and deserves an unhurried couple of hours. Pietrabbondante, higher and further north, is the Samnite counterpart — a theatre built into the hillside with the seats shaped to the back. Altilia, Larino and Venafro each hold Roman remains with almost no visitors.

Agnone and the Alto Molise

Agnone is the region's craft town: the bell foundry and its museum, plus a copper-working tradition. Around it the Alto Molise is high, wooded and thinly populated, with beech forest at Collemeluccio-Montedimezzo — a UNESCO biosphere reserve — and Capracotta, one of the snowiest inhabited places in Italy.

Campobasso and Isernia

Campobasso, the capital, is a working provincial city with a castle above it and the Misteri procession at Corpus Domini — 18th-century iron frames on which costumed children are suspended in mid-air tableaux and carried through the streets. Isernia holds the Palaeolithic museum.

The coast

Termoli is the only coastal town of size: a walled old quarter on a promontory, a cathedral, and boats to the Tremiti islands in summer. The trabucchi — timber fishing platforms cantilevered over the water — line the coast north of it.

The tratturi

The Tratturo Magno and its branches can be walked in sections. Spring is the time: the grass is high, the villages are accessible and the heat has not arrived.

How long: three or four days covers the region properly.

Molise's central problem is not too many visitors. It is that there are too few people at all.

Depopulation

The region has lost population steadily for over a century, first to the Americas and later to northern Italy, and it continues to fall. Whole villages in the Alto Molise have a few dozen permanent residents, most of them elderly, and some have joined schemes selling houses for a nominal sum to attract new inhabitants.

The practical consequence for a visitor is straightforward: where you spend matters more here than almost anywhere. Staying in a village albergo diffuso, eating in the one restaurant, buying cheese from the producer — these are not gestures, they are a meaningful share of that place's annual income.

Seasonal concentration

The only real pressure is on the short coast in August, when Termoli fills with Italian holidaymakers. Inland is quiet in every month of the year.

The tratturi

The droving roads are public land and legally protected, but stretches have been ploughed or built over. They are walkable and it is worth keeping to them rather than cutting across the fields beside them.

Earthquake

The 2002 San Giuliano di Puglia earthquake killed 27 children and their teacher when a school collapsed, and it reshaped Italian building-safety law. Several villages still carry the evidence of reconstruction.

Truffles

Molise produces a substantial share of Italy's truffle, much of which is sold on and marketed under other regions' names. Buying from Molisano producers at source keeps the value where the work is done.

Molise has cold, snowy winters inland and hot summers, and a short shoulder season that is the best of it.

• April-June. The best window. The tratturi are green, the villages are accessible, wildflowers are out on the Matese, and the archaeological sites are comfortable to walk. Late spring is also when transhumance re-enactments occur.
• July-August. Hot inland, 32-35 °C in the valleys, and the coast at Termoli is at its busiest and most expensive — though modest by Adriatic standards. Mountain villages stay cool and this is when they come alive, as emigrant families return for the summer. Many sagre fall in August.
• September-October. Excellent. The heat breaks, the harvests run, truffle season begins, and the beech forests of the Alto Molise turn.
• November-March. Cold and often severe inland. Capracotta recorded one of the heaviest single-day snowfalls ever measured anywhere, in March 2015, and mountain roads close. The coast stays mild. Two winter fixtures are worth planning around: the 'Ndocciata at Agnone on 8 and 24 December, when hundreds of huge fir torches are carried through the town, and Carnival at Larino and Tufara.

Relative cost index vs region average

Molise is among the least expensive regions in Italy, and the range above is narrow in absolute terms.