Day trips
Day trips from L'Aquila
45 towns within 90 minutes
Closest first. L'Aquila is 13 minutes out. Drive times are computed on real roads, so they are a fair estimate rather than a promise about traffic.
The towns
L'Aquila
Province: L'Aquila · 721 m
13 minutes from L'Aquila. The regional capital at 721 meters, founded by Frederick II around 1240 and still reconstructing after the 2009 earthquake.
Scurcola Marsicana
Province: L'Aquila · 700 m
36 minutes from L'Aquila. At 700 meters below Monte San Nicola, the field where a medieval battle ended Swabian power in southern Italy.
Ovindoli
Province: L'Aquila · 1,375 m
38 minutes from L'Aquila. At 1,375 meters on the Altopiano delle Rocche, the closest serious ski station to Rome, working since 1959 on the slopes of Monte Magnola.
Navelli
Province: L'Aquila · 760 m
42 minutes from L'Aquila. At 760 meters above the Navelli plain, the pyramid of stone houses growing the saffron a 13th-century Dominican brought from Spain.
Santo Stefano di Sessanio
Province: L'Aquila · 1,250 m
42 minutes from L'Aquila. A Medici outpost at 1,250 meters, restored building by building since 1999 into Italy's first scattered hotel.
Tagliacozzo
Province: L'Aquila · 740 m
44 minutes from L'Aquila. A Marsica town at 740 meters, built around a ducal palace and a battle that once decided the fate of southern Italy.
Capistrello
Province: L'Aquila · 734 m
45 minutes from L'Aquila. At 734 meters where the upper Liri valley meets the Marsica, the village where an emperor's tunnel emptied a lake into a river.
Castelvecchio Calvisio
Province: L'Aquila · 1,067 m
46 minutes from L'Aquila. 124 people at 1,067 meters on a ridge above the Tirino, inside a fortified ellipse of stone walls with alleys orthogonal to its perimeter.
Isola del Gran Sasso d'Italia
Province: Teramo · 415 m
48 minutes from L'Aquila. At 415 meters at the foot of a massif holding the Apennines' highest peak outside Sicily, the commune's sanctuary ranks among the world's fifteen most-visited Catholic shrines.
Carsoli
Province: L'Aquila · 616 m
49 minutes from L'Aquila. A 616-meter mountain town in the Marsica, built next to the ruins of a 4th-century BC Roman fortress town.
Rocca di Botte
Province: L'Aquila · 750 m
50 minutes from L'Aquila. At 750 meters on the Carseolani slopes between Abruzzo and Lazio, the birthplace of an eleventh-century hermit and a fief of the Colonna.
Morino
Province: L'Aquila · 440 m
53 minutes from L'Aquila. A village at 440 meters on the Lazio border, beneath the central Apennines' second-highest waterfall at over 80 meters.
Pescina
Province: L'Aquila · 735 m
53 minutes from L'Aquila. A Marsica town at 735 meters, on the rim of the drained Fucino basin, that lost five thousand of six thousand people in a single morning in 1915.
Sante Marie
Province: L'Aquila · 950 m
54 minutes from L'Aquila. A 950-meter Marsica village and the trailhead of the Cammino dei Briganti, the seven-day brigand trail through the Cartore band's territory.
Capestrano
Province: L'Aquila · 465 m
56 minutes from L'Aquila. A hilltop village at 465 meters above the Tirino valley, where in 1934 a farmer turned up the 6th-century BC limestone Warrior of Capestrano.
Cappadocia
Province: L'Aquila · 1,102 m
56 minutes from L'Aquila. A 576-resident Marsican borgo at 1,102m in Abruzzo's western mountains, where the river Liri rises, with a name many mistake for the wrong country.
Castelvecchio Subequo
Province: L'Aquila · 409 m
56 minutes from L'Aquila. At 409 meters in the Subequana valley, the Roman Superaequum and Franciscan station where the saint himself was given land for a convent built between 1221 and 1261.
Campli
Province: Teramo · 393 m
58 minutes from L'Aquila. A 393-meter town under the Monti della Laga, held by the Farnese for two centuries, with a Scala Santa carrying papal indulgence.
Ofena
Province: L'Aquila · 531 m
59 minutes from L'Aquila. A 531-meter Vestian basin called the Forno d'Abruzzo, where Montepulciano ripens on what may be the oldest of its slopes.
Corfinio
Province: L'Aquila · 346 m
62 minutes from L'Aquila. A village of under a thousand on the Peligna valley floor at 346 meters, sitting on the Italic League's would-be capital Italia.
Calascio
Province: L'Aquila · 1,200 m
63 minutes from L'Aquila. A village of 122 people under the highest castle in the Apennines, cast as the monk's refuge in Ladyhawke.
Anversa degli Abruzzi
Province: L'Aquila · 604 m
64 minutes from L'Aquila. At 604 meters above the Sagittario Gorges, a cliff village built around a Norman castle rebuilt by the Counts of Sangro.
Civita d'Antino
Province: L'Aquila · 904 m
64 minutes from L'Aquila. At 904 meters above the Roveto valley, the ancient Marsi town that became a Danish painters' colony from 1883 until the 1915 earthquake.
Civitella del Tronto
Province: Teramo · 589 m
64 minutes from L'Aquila. A rocky crest at 589 meters above the Tronto valley, crowned by the last Bourbon fortress to surrender to united Italy in March 1861.
Roseto degli Abruzzi
Province: Teramo · 8 m
64 minutes from L'Aquila. An Adriatic beach town of 25,500 with ten kilometers of low-rise sand, a hilltop frazione at 285 meters, and Blue Flags every year since 1999.
Giulianova
Province: Teramo · 68 m
66 minutes from L'Aquila. Coastal town split between hilltop Paese at 68 meters and the Lido below, one rebuilt as a Renaissance ideal city, the other grown around a working fishing fleet.
Balsorano
Province: L'Aquila · 359 m
67 minutes from L'Aquila. A pentagonal fortress above the Liri river that became a backdrop for 1970s Italian horror cinema.
Pietracamela
Province: Teramo · 1,005 m
67 minutes from L'Aquila. A village of 199 people clinging at 1,005 meters under the north wall of Corno Piccolo, birthplace of Italian Apennine climbing in 1925.
Pineto
Province: Teramo · 4 m
67 minutes from L'Aquila. A planned twentieth-century beach town named for D'Annunzio's poem, with the sixteenth-century Cerrano tower anchoring Abruzzo's first marine protected area.
Goriano Sicoli
Province: L'Aquila · 720 m
69 minutes from L'Aquila. At 720 meters in the Subequana valley, a medieval village drawn by M.C. Escher in 1929 keeps a May ritual folklorists trace to Demeter.
Roccacasale
Province: L'Aquila · 450 m
69 minutes from L'Aquila. A village of 576 under the ruins of a castle blown up by Napoleon's army in 1803.
Atri
Province: Teramo · 442 m
70 minutes from L'Aquila. At 442 meters on three hills ten kilometers from the Adriatic, ancient Hadria, source of the emperor Hadrian's family name and the Adriatic's.
Alba Adriatica
Province: Teramo · 5 m
73 minutes from L'Aquila. The second of the Teramo coast's seven sisters from the north, a 1956 spin-off from Tortoreto with a fine-sand beach known as the Spiaggia d'Argento.
Sulmona
Province: L'Aquila · 405 m
74 minutes from L'Aquila. At 405 meters in the Valle Peligna, birthplace of Ovid in 43 BC and home of the sugared-almond confetti craft since the 15th century.
Controguerra
Province: Teramo · 267 m
75 minutes from L'Aquila. A 267-meter hill village whose name is legal shorthand for a small Montepulciano and Trebbiano-Passerina DOC.
Villalago
Province: L'Aquila · 930 m
75 minutes from L'Aquila. A 930-meter village above three lakes, named for the nine that once filled the valley, with a hermit's cave on the water's edge.
Castel del Monte
Province: L'Aquila · 1,346 m
76 minutes from L'Aquila. At 1,346 meters under Monte Bolza facing Rocca Calascio, the capital of shepherds, whose wool reached the Medici and whose witches return each August.
Scanno
Province: L'Aquila · 1,057 m
79 minutes from L'Aquila. A 1,057-meter Sagittario valley village where women in black still walk the alleys photographed by Cartier-Bresson and Giacomelli.
Tocco da Casauria
Province: Pescara · 356 m
83 minutes from L'Aquila. A 356-meter hill town between the Pescara river and the Maiella, built around a Carolingian abbey and an herb liqueur called Centerba.
Pescasseroli
Province: L'Aquila · 1,167 m
84 minutes from L'Aquila. At 1,167 meters at the head of the Sangro valley, capital of Italy's oldest national park and birthplace of Benedetto Croce.
Pettorano sul Gizio
Province: L'Aquila · 656 m
84 minutes from L'Aquila. At 656 meters above the Gizio river, a Cantelmo fortress town that guarded the gateway to the Peligna valley for four hundred years.
Città Sant'Angelo
Province: Pescara · 320 m
86 minutes from L'Aquila. A hilltop borgo at 320 meters between the Vestina hills and the Adriatic, named for the Archangel and home to a Collegiata since 1353.
Pacentro
Province: L'Aquila · 650 m
86 minutes from L'Aquila. A medieval village at 650 meters under the Caldora castle towers, where every September a barefoot race honors a Madonna and a pop singer's grandparents.
Silvi
Province: Teramo · 242 m
86 minutes from L'Aquila. A split town on the Teramo coast, medieval Silvi Paese at 242 meters above a nine-kilometer beach that built itself on licorice in the 1930s.
Manoppello
Province: Pescara · 257 m
90 minutes from L'Aquila. A hill town above the Pescara river, where the Capuchins have kept the veil known as the Volto Santo since 1638.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Rieti
Province: Rieti
The Sabine capital on the Velino, claimed as the center of Italy, under Monte Terminillo and the Franciscan sanctuaries of the Valle Santa.
Courmayeur
Province: Aosta Valley
The Italian base of Mont Blanc, the roughly 4,806-meter peak, a medieval mountain village near the Roman road over the Little Saint Bernard that became one of the country's best-known ski addresses.
Pizzighettone
Province: Cremona
A walled town on the Adda below Cremona, where Francis I of France was held for fifty days in the Torre del Guado after Pavia.
Fosdinovo
Province: Massa-Carrara
The southern Lunigiana stronghold at 500 meters, the Malaspina castle where Dante took shelter in 1306 and later set a Purgatorio canto.
Taverna
Province: Catanzaro
A hilltown at the foot of a mountain plateau, its stone core arranged around a fifteenth-century Dominican church.