Discover Campobasso

A concise introduction to Campobasso, its geography, history and culture.

Introduction

Campobasso is the capital of Molise, a city of roughly forty-eight thousand people at about 700 metres in the hills between the Apennines and the Adriatic.

The Castello Monforte, rebuilt in the sixteenth century on older foundations, stands on the summit with the whole province visible from its walls.

Below it the Borgo Antico climbs the hill in stepped lanes, with the Romanesque churches of San Bartolomeo and San Giorgio at its top.

Everything else is the new city, laid out from 1814 on the flatter ground below in a regular grid — a rare piece of deliberate Bourbon planning in the south.

The city is known across Italy for the Sagra dei Misteri and, more quietly, for a cutlery-making tradition that ran for centuries.

The Villa de Capoa, a nineteenth-century public garden, is the best thing to sit in.