Campobasso Discovery Guide
Why Visit Campobasso the Smart Way
Campobasso is a city of about forty-eight thousand people at 700 metres in Molise, which is the least visited region in Italy and knows it. The running joke in the rest of the country is that Molise does not exist.
The friction is that the city will not charm you into anything. It is a working regional capital of nineteenth- and twentieth-century streets below a medieval quarter, with a castle on top and very little arranged for visitors.
What it has is one extraordinary thing. On the feast of Corpus Domini, thirteen iron machines built in the 1740s are carried through the streets with children strapped into them, dressed as angels, saints and devils and apparently standing on air. The devices are the originals. Beyond that, the Samnite sites at Sepino and Pietrabbondante are within an hour, and they are among the least crowded ruins in the country.
How to Experience Campobasso
Climb to the castle at the end of the day
Free, twenty minutes up through the old town, and the whole of Molise laid out below with the Matese on one side and the Adriatic on the other.
Go to the Misteri museum
The eighteenth-century devices, up close and out of costume, which is the only way to understand how they work.
Walk the Borgo Antico
Stepped, stone, half-empty and completely quiet, ten minutes from a modern high street.
Eat Tintilia and pecorino
A grape and a cheese that stayed in the region because nobody outside it was interested.
Drive to Saepinum
Half an hour: a complete small Roman town with its gates, forum and theatre, usually with nobody in it.
Sit in Villa de Capoa
The nineteenth-century garden, which is where the city actually relaxes.
Where to Find Authentic Cultural and Historical Character
Campobasso is a small administrative capital in a region that Italy forgets, and it has a complicated relationship with that.
People are direct, hospitable and quite funny about the national joke, which they will make before you do. There is also real irritation underneath it: the region is small, poor in infrastructure, and easily overlooked, and being a punchline wears thin.
Depopulation is the dominant fact. Molise has lost people continuously for a hundred and forty years, first to the Americas and now to Rome, Bologna and abroad, and the university keeps young people here for three years rather than for good.
Visitors are rare enough to be interesting rather than a nuisance, and the welcome is correspondingly open. Very little English is spoken.
The Misteri organise a great deal of social life: the associations, the families, the rehearsals and the arguments run through the year, not just the day.
The 2002 San Giuliano earthquake, which killed a class of schoolchildren in this province, is a live and painful subject.
Travel Profile
- Best Known For The Sagra dei Misteri, thirteen iron machines built in the 1740s • A castle with the whole of Molise visible from its walls • A Bourbon grid city below a medieval hill town • Saepinum and Pietrabbondante within an hour
- Travel Styles Cultural tourism • History • Archaeology • Festivals • Off the beaten path • Food and drink • Hiking
- Travel Environments Historic cities • Countryside • Mountains
- Getting Around The least well connected regional capital in Italy: no motorway reaches the city, the railway is a slow branch line towards Termoli and Benevento with no direct trains to Rome, and frequent coaches to Rome and Naples are what almost everyone actually uses; by road Rome is about two and a half hours, Naples two, and Termoli an hour northeast, while the new city is a flat grid on foot and the old town and castle are a twenty-minute stepped climb
Responsible Travel Tips
Molise has no overtourism problem in any form. Its problem is that people leave and do not come back.
Stay in the region rather than day-tripping through it. Almost all of Molise's visitors are passing between Rome and Puglia. A night here is worth more to the place than any amount of goodwill.
Buy what the region actually makes: Tintilia, pecorino and caciocavallo, and the oil from the Biferno valley. These are small producers with no export market.
Treat the Misteri as a religious procession that you are a guest at, not a spectacle. Do not block the bearers, and remember that the figures on the machines are children.
At Saepinum and Pietrabbondante, both lightly staffed, stay off the structures and take nothing.
In the Matese, fire risk is serious in summer and the karst has open shafts away from paths.
The abandoned parts of the Borgo Antico are private property and some of it is unsafe; look, do not enter.
When to Visit Campobasso
The feast of Corpus Domini, on a Sunday in late May or June, is the one date to plan around: the Misteri procession is the reason Campobasso is known at all.
May and June otherwise are green, mild and the best time for the Samnite sites and the Matese.
September and October are clear and settled, with the best long views of the year from the castle.
August is pleasantly cool compared with the coast, and is when people who left the region come back.
Winter is cold, windy and often snowy, and the city carries on entirely as normal.
Note that the Museo dei Misteri is the way to see the devices on any other day of the year, and that it keeps short hours.
Travel Cost Levels in Campobasso
What a visitor actually pays in Campobasso
Campobasso is among the cheapest provincial capitals in Italy, because its economy is administrative and there is no visitor premium on anything. The single exception is the Corpus Domini weekend, when the city fills with people from across the province and the surrounding region and rooms disappear well in advance.