The 6 best hidden towns with a serious restaurant in the province of L'Aquila

1. Rivisondoli

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

1 h 29 min from Pescara · homes €1,850 to €2,500 a m² in the center · 659 people

Why visit Rivisondoli

Rivisondoli sits on the flank of Monte Calvario, looking down at the plateau that runs north toward Roccaraso. The town was first recorded in 724 in a diploma of Grimoald II, Duke of Benevento, and grew in the 12th century along the Via degli Abruzzi, the military and trade route across the central Apennines.

It was once known for its weapons production. The 1792 fire destroyed most of the village, and the opening of the Sulmona-Isernia railway in the 19th century turned it toward tourism rather than trade.

The Italian royal family kept a residence here in 1913. Rivisondoli and Roccaraso face each other across the Cinque Miglia plateau, close enough that their ski slopes were joined into one domain and their names are now said together.

The older village, rebuilt twice, climbs one flank of the mountain while the plateau below stays open and treeless, the same ground that once slowed traders and caravans on the route through the Apennines. What began as a stop on a military road became, after fire and war remade the town twice, a place oriented instead toward winter visitors and a single night in January.

Da Giocondo is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

The catch: January nights average 3 degrees below zero.

What to see in Rivisondoli

• Alto Sangro ski area. The lift network runs between 1,309 and 2,142 meters, joining Rivisondoli's slopes to Roccaraso's across the open plateau.
• Presepe Vivente. Hundreds of villagers in period costume take the hillside outside town for the performance, the cast spread across the open ground rather than a stage.
• Altopiano delle Cinque Miglia. Treeless and averaging 1,250 meters, the plateau in the Alto Sangro is prone to extreme winter winds, a stretch that historically caught travelers unprepared.

How to get to Rivisondoli

Pescara is about 1 h 29 min away by road.

Everything we know about Rivisondoli

2. Pacentro

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

1 h 9 min from Pescara · homes €420 to €620 a m² in the center · 1,058 people

Why visit Pacentro

Pacentro sits at 650 meters on a hill spur in the Peligna valley, eight kilometers from Sulmona and inside the Maiella National Park. The Castello Caldora, with its three surviving square towers, dominates the village from the Colle Castello above.

The site has held a castle since the eleventh century; the structure visible today was begun by the Caldora-Cantelmo family in the late fourteenth century and bought by the comune in 1957 and restored. On the first Sunday of September, the Corsa degli Zingari sends barefoot runners down a rocky slope from Monte Ardinghi into the village in honor of the Madonna di Loreto.

The race is documented since the fifteenth century. The other thing people come for is the Ciccone house.

Madonna's paternal grandparents, Gaetano Ciccone and Michelina Di Iulio, emigrated from Pacentro in 1919. The pop singer visited in 2013.

Taverna dei Caldora is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Slow Food's Osterie d'Italia.

What to see in Pacentro

• Castello Caldora-Cantelmo. Late fourteenth-century fortress on the Colle Castello, three of its four corner towers still standing, restored after 1957.
• Borgo medievale. Stone houses arranged on terraces below the castle, listed among the Borghi più belli d'Italia, preserved in its medieval plan.
• Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore. Sixteenth-century parish church with a baroque interior, holding the Madonna di Loreto honored in the September race.

How to get to Pacentro

Pescara is about 1 h 9 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pacentro

3. Pescocostanzo

Best for walks in a national park. Part of the comune lies in a national park.

1 h 25 min from Pescara · homes €2,150 to €2,700 a m² in the center · 1,085 people

Why visit Pescocostanzo

Pescocostanzo sits at 1,395 meters at the southern edge of the Quarto Grande plateau, the high karst basin above the Sangro valley. The town was reshaped between 1456 and the eighteenth century under the Capua family and a generation of Lombard masons who arrived to build for them.

The plan is unusually regular for a mountain commune: a grid of stone houses oriented to the wind, surrounded by woods and pasture. The Collegiata di Santa Maria del Colle, restructured by Cosimo Fanzago in the seventeenth century, is one of the rare five-nave churches in Abruzzo.

Its wrought iron Chapel of the Sacrament gate, made by Sante di Rocco between 1699 and 1707, is the masterpiece of local ironwork. Bobbin lace, merletto al tombolo, is still made here.

The Museo del Merletto a Tombolo inside Palazzo Fanzago shows the technique and the patterns. Filigree gold, carved wood, and lace are still sold on the Corso Roma.

La Corniola (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Essentia (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

The catch: January nights average 3 degrees below zero.

What to see in Pescocostanzo

• Collegiata di Santa Maria del Colle. Five-nave church begun in the late Middle Ages and remodeled by Cosimo Fanzago in the seventeenth century.
• Museo del Merletto a Tombolo. Inside Palazzo Fanzago, displays the local bobbin lace tradition with patterns, tools, and live demonstrations.
• Palazzo Fanzago. Designed by the baroque architect Cosimo Fanzago in 1624, the seat of the lace museum and civic offices.

How to get to Pescocostanzo

Pescara is about 1 h 25 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pescocostanzo

4. Roccaraso

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

1 h 34 min from Pescara · homes €1,950 to €2,850 a m² in the center · 1,492 people

Why visit Roccaraso

The town sits where the plateaus of Aremogna and Pizzalto meet the higher ground toward Monte Greco, the peak that anchors the whole range at 2,283 meters. The two plateaus are joined by lift, grazed and hiked in summer, cut into pistes in winter: the same trails serve both seasons under different cover.

Four kilometers uphill sits the older, smaller settlement, a medieval frazione that took the weight of the war the valley town below did not escape either. The Germans dug into the Gustav Line where it crossed through here, the Allies bombed in response, and the town below was leveled along with it.

What stands in Roccaraso now was rebuilt after that, stone by stone, from what the bombing left. The first ski lift on Monte Zurrone went up in 1936, years before any of it, and skiing resumed after the rebuilding and never really stopped.

The area has held its place as the south's ski capital since, though the snow line keeps rising: in January 2024 only twenty of Abruzzo's 122 pistes were open. A resort built twice, once by engineers before the war and once by survivors after it, still runs on the same slopes either way.

Chichibio is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and L'Espresso's restaurant guide.

The catch: January nights average 3 degrees below zero.

What to see in Roccaraso

• Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. Baroque travertine façade, gilded walnut pulpit in the shape of a Greek cross, painted and gilded wooden organs.
• Pietransieri. Medieval frazione where the Limmari Massacre took place; the Gold Medal of Military Valour recognizes what its people lost that winter.
• Piano Aremogna. High pasture and ski terrain at 1,650 meters, the eastern flank of the Alto Sangro ski domain.

How to get to Roccaraso

Pescara is about 1 h 34 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Roccaraso

5. Carsoli

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

1 h from Rome · homes €670 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 4,957 people

Why visit Carsoli

Carsoli sits at 616 meters in the Marsica, between the plain of the former Fucino lake and the valley of the Turano river, with Monte Velino and Monte Calvo both rising above 2,000 meters on its skyline. The modern town stands four kilometers northeast of Alba Fucens's neighbor Carsioli, the Roman colony founded between 302 and 298 BC as a stronghold to guard the road to Alba Fucens; walls and an aqueduct still stand at the locality of Muro Pertuso, surveyed in 1901 by the archaeologists Pfeiffer and Ashby.

The town's religious and military history sits closer to the modern center than the Roman ruins do. The Castle of Colle Sant'Angelo, raised around the year 1000 by the Counts of the Marsi, stood until later wars, and ruins of its adjoining church remain near the site.

Carsoli's autumn season runs on chestnut and polenta fairs with deep peasant roots, and the patron-saint feast of Santa Vittoria fills the streets with procession and stalls. The town's layout traces its own history: a Roman garrison post relocated over centuries into a medieval and then modern settlement, so that walking from the modern center outward means walking backward through the different periods that built it.

L'Angolo d'Abruzzo (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and V'Incanto Osteria Moderna (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Carsoli

• Sito archeologico di Carsioli. The city walls and aqueduct still stand at the site, four km from the modern town, surveyed by archaeologists in 1901.
• Chiesa di Santa Maria in Cellis. The church stands on the edge of town, with a rose window set over the main portal.
• Chiesa di Sant'Antonio. 16th-century church inside the centro storico, used as a hospital and later as a nursery, with a frescoed altar inside.

How to get to Carsoli

It has its own railway station. Rome is about 1 h away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Carsoli

6. Castel di Sangro

1 h 53 min from Pescara · homes €1,100 to €1,650 a m² in the center · 6,629 people

Why visit Castel di Sangro

Castel di Sangro sits at 805 meters at the confluence of the Sangro and Zittola rivers, the main town of the Alto Sangro. Before the Romans it was Aufidena, a Samnite city, and the traces of that older settlement remain on the slopes outside the modern center, separate from the hill town that grew up later.

The town itself divides between the newer lower streets and Civita, the old quarter that climbs toward the monastery above. That geography decided the fighting in November 1943: the monastery's height over the town made it the objective, and the parachute battalion holding it had the advantage the attacking regiment could not overcome in a single night.

The same steep, isolated position that made the town hard to take in 1943 has shaped its more recent story too. A football club from a town of this size reaching Serie B, and a three-star restaurant opening in the countryside nearby, both read as the town periodically outgrowing what its size and location would predict.

Reale (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Materia Prima (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and OlyaS (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Castel di Sangro

• Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta. Rebuilt on a Greek-cross plan after the earthquake that destroyed its predecessor, the church stands as the national monument of a town otherwise remade by war and football.
• Civita. The oldest quarter, climbing the hill toward the former monastery that the Canadians tried and failed to take in a single night.
• Aufidena archaeological site. Necropolis and city remains on the slopes outside town, predating the medieval settlement by centuries; finds are held in the municipal archaeological museum.

How to get to Castel di Sangro

Pescara is about 1 h 53 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Castel di Sangro