Campobasso Culture

Campobasso's culture is concentrated in one day of the year and spread thin across the rest.

The Misteri

The thirteen devices were designed and built by a local sculptor, Paolo Saverio Di Zinno, in the 1740s. Each is a wrought-iron armature, hidden under costume, that holds several people — mostly children — in poses that look impossible: saints suspended above devils, angels standing on air. They are carried through the city on that day by families who have done it for generations, and the right to carry or to be carried is inherited.

Knives

The cutlery trade shaped the old town for centuries, with whole streets of forges. Very little survives commercially, but the museum collections and the street names remember it.

Molise non esiste

The national joke that the region does not exist is repeated here with a mixture of irritation and enjoyment, and has been turned into a tourism slogan more than once.

Food

Sheep country cooking: pecorino and caciocavallo, lamb, pampanella pork from nearby Sant'Elia, and hand-cut pasta. Molise grows its own wine, mostly Tintilia, a red grape found essentially nowhere else.

Two languages nobody expects

Molise holds an Arberesh Albanian-speaking community, settled in the fifteenth century, and three villages — Acquaviva Collecroce, Montemitro and San Felice — that still speak a Slavic language brought from the Balkans at about the same time and found nowhere else on earth. Both are within an hour of the city.

The tratturi

The great drove roads of the transhumance cross the region, and Campobasso sits near the Castel di Sangro–Lucera route.