The 6 prettiest villages with a serious restaurant within 90 minutes of Pescara

1. Pacentro

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

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

2. Pescocostanzo

Best for a small town. 1,085 people live here.

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

3. Caramanico Terme

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

1 h 1 min from Pescara · homes €550 to €820 a m² in the center · 1,727 people

Why visit Caramanico Terme

The name carries the Lombard arimannia, a settled clan of the late Middle Ages, and the town grew under the D'Aquino family in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the main religious buildings went up. Terme was added to the name in 1960, recognising what had been known and used since at least 1576, when the friar Serafino Razzi wrote of a sulphur spring said to cure the chest.

The village sits between Monte Morrone and the Majella, with the historic core on the hilltop above and the spa lower down, closer to the meeting of the two rivers. The abbey stands apart from both, five kilometers out, a separate outpost from the town it belongs to.

What holds the place together is the water: a medieval settlement, a fourteenth-century noble family's building program, and a twentieth-century name change all trace back to the same springs first written about in 1576.

Locanda del Barone is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Caramanico Terme

• Abbazia di San Tommaso Becket. Romanesque, standing unfinished since work stopped, the walls left mid-build over the older pieve beneath. The distance from the center keeps it apart from the rest of the town's sights, reached on its own.
• Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore. Fifteenth-century church with a Gothic exterior and an ogival portal showing the Coronation of the Virgin dated 1476.
• Terme di Caramanico. The spa complex built around the two springs, with treatment programs for respiratory, ENT, skin and joint conditions organized across the site today.

How to get to Caramanico Terme

Pescara is about 1 h 1 min away by road.

Everything we know about Caramanico Terme

4. Offida

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

1 h 14 min from Pescara · homes €650 to €900 a m² in the center · 4,581 people

Why visit Offida

Offida sits at 293 meters on a cliff between the Tesino and Tronto valleys, twenty-three kilometers from Ascoli Piceno. The Chiesa di Santa Maria della Rocca rises on a rock spur at the western edge of the village, surrounded on three sides by cliffs that drop into two valleys: a Romanesque-Gothic temple in brick and travertine, raised by Master Albertino in 1330 on an older Benedictine foundation, with a double row of trilobed arches around the apse.

Inside, the apse and transept hold the fresco cycle of the Master of Offida, an anonymous monk painter who carried Giotto's lesson through the Rimini school, with the Marriage of Saint Catherine and Saint Christopher dated by inscription to 1367. Bobbin lace, merletto a tombolo, has been worked in town for at least five centuries; the Museo del Merletto in Palazzo De Castellotti holds the collection.

The Carnevale Storico, with the Bove finto run and the Vlurd fire bundles, fills the days before Lent, in February or early March.

Osteria Ophis (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and Blob Caffè & Ristorante (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Offida

• Chiesa di Santa Maria della Rocca. Romanesque-Gothic brick-and-travertine church raised in 1330 by Master Albertino on a rock spur west of town, with the Master of Offida fresco cycle dated 1367 in the transept.
• Museo del Merletto a Tombolo. Inside Palazzo De Castellotti, with the lace collection, tools, historical documents and demonstrations of the bobbin-lace work practiced in town for at least five centuries.
• Palazzo Comunale. Civic palace on the long Piazza del Popolo, with its portico and the Teatro Serpente Aureo built into the old town hall.

How to get to Offida

Pescara is about 1 h 14 min away by road.

Everything we know about Offida

5. Guardiagrele

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

47 min from Pescara · homes €720 to €1,050 a m² in the center · 8,250 people

Why visit Guardiagrele

Guardiagrele sits at 576 meters on the eastern Majella foothills, thirty kilometers from Pescara. Gabriele D'Annunzio called it the terrazza d'Abruzzo for the views over the mountains and valleys from its piazzas.

Documented in an eleventh-century papal bull as a villa named Grele, the town grew through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a stronghold of the Kingdom of Naples, with permission from the king to mint coins. It produced the late medieval goldsmith Nicola Gallucci, known as Nicola da Guardiagrele (c.1385-c.1462), trained on Gothic and Tuscan models including Lorenzo Ghiberti, who left work in cathedrals across Abruzzo.

The collegiate church of Santa Maria Maggiore, built at the start of the thirteenth century outside the walls and absorbed into the town in the centuries after, carries a fifteenth-century portal with a Coronation of the Virgin lunette by Nicola, now in the Duomo museum. Wrought-iron, copper and gold work still operate from workshops in the centro storico.

Villa Maiella (MICHELIN and L'Espresso) and La Grotta dei Raselli (Slow Food) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Guardiagrele

• Collegiata di Santa Maria Maggiore. Thirteenth-century collegiate church with a massive bell tower, fifteenth-century portal, and the Nicola da Guardiagrele Coronation lunette in its museum.
• Museo del Duomo. Cathedral museum holding Nicola da Guardiagrele's Coronation of the Virgin in Majella stone, his processional cross of 1431, and sacred works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
• Botteghe del rame e del ferro battuto. Active copper and wrought-iron workshops in the centro storico, the surviving craft tradition that produced Nicola Gallucci in the late fourteenth century.

How to get to Guardiagrele

Pescara is about 47 min away by road. The full route from Rome.

Everything we know about Guardiagrele

6. Grottammare

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

59 min from Pescara · homes €1,500 to €3,000 a m² in the center · 15,924 people

Why visit Grottammare

Grottammare sits on the Ascoli Piceno coast at the mouth of the Tesino. The town splits into two nuclei that never merged: a lungomare on the Adriatic, laid out with palms and Liberty villas in the late nineteenth century, and an older settlement on the hill above, reached by climbing away from the water rather than along it.

Felice Peretti was born in that upper settlement on 13 December 1521, in a house on what became the borgo's central square. He left, rose through the church, and returned as Pope Sixtus V only in monument: two churches he commissioned for his birthplace after 1585, one built beside the house itself and one now holding the collection of objects he sent back from Rome.

The upper town still carries its eleventh-century walls and the traces of an earlier fortress on the Incasato spur, and it has been named among the Borghi più belli d'Italia. The coast below has its own separate recognitions, for water quality and for the management of the hills behind it.

The two halves read as a single biography split in space: the hill holds the birth and the memory, the shore holds the later invention of the town as a seaside resort, and neither nucleus explains itself without the other.

Attico sul Mare (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Il Topicco (Slow Food), La Cantina di Sant'Agustino 1650 (Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in Grottammare

• Paese Alto (Borgo Antico). Brick lanes climb the Incasato hill inside the eleventh-century walls, past the remains of a fortified spur that looks down over the seafront below.
• Chiesa di Santa Lucia. On the central square of the upper town, next to the house of Peretti's birth, a plain sixteenth-century commission from a native son grown powerful.
• Museo Sistino. Inside the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista, the liturgical objects on display came back to the town only after the local boy had become pope.

How to get to Grottammare

It has its own railway station. Pescara is about 59 min away by road.

Everything we know about Grottammare