Hill towns
Hill towns in Campania
16 towns
The ridge and hilltop borghi, sitting around 400 metres. Vineyards below, one road up, walkable once you are there. Good in almost any season.
Zungoli
Province: Avellino · 657 m
An Irpinia ridge between the Ufita valley and the Daunian hills, with walls above and tuff caves below the houses.
Lapio
Province: Avellino · 590 m
An 1,428-resident Irpinia hilltop borgo at 590m in the hills east of Avellino, recognised by a rare four-signal combination (Città del Vino + Olio + Miele + Nocciola) for the whole local agricultural ecosystem.
Roscigno
Province: Salerno · 570 m
A Cilento ghost town at 570 meters, emptied by a 1902 landslide and known as the Pompeii of the twentieth century.
Mercogliano
Province: Avellino · 550 m
A 550-meter Irpinia town on the slope of Partenio, gateway to the Montevergine Sanctuary 1,270 meters above.
Calitri
Province: Avellino · 530 m
A ceramic town at 530 meters, half-emptied by the 1980 earthquake and rebuilt around an August festival of music, words and ritual.
Castelcivita
Province: Salerno · 526 m
A small Alburni hill town at 526 meters in the Cilento national park, the surface entrance to a 4,800-meter karst cave inhabited 40,000 years ago.
Perito
Province: Salerno · 480 m
A Cilento ridge town at 480 meters above the Alento valley, once a center of black-powder production for hunting, defense and brigands.
Cusano Mutri
Province: Benevento · 475 m
A Sannio hill borgo at 475 meters on the south face of the Matese, the only town in the area spared by the 1688 earthquake.
Taurasi
Province: Avellino · 400 m
An Irpinia wine village at 400 meters above the Calore valley, the southern home of Aglianico called Barolo of the South.
Morigerati
Province: Salerno · 340 m
A 608-person Cilento village above the Bussento gorge, the river surfacing from underground caves directly beneath the cliffs.
Montesarchio
Province: Benevento · 300 m
Ancient Caudium at 300 meters, a Roman defeat still attached to the name two thousand years later.
Cerreto Sannita
Province: Benevento · 290 m
A Sannio ceramics town at 290 meters, replanned on an orthogonal grid after the 1688 earthquake leveled the old hill.
Auletta
Province: Salerno · 280 m
A Tanagro hill town above the Cilento-Vallo di Diano park, fortified by 1000 AD, scene of an 1861 anti-Piedmont massacre and an 1857 earthquake.
Tufo
Province: Avellino · 250 m
A 250-meter Irpinia hill town on sulfur-rich limestone slopes, twenty kilometers north of Avellino.
Sessa Aurunca
Province: Caserta · 203 m
Ancient Suessa Aurunca on the south slope of an extinct volcano, with a Romanesque cathedral of Cosmatesque mosaics built in 1103.
Caiazzo
Province: Caserta · 200 m
A Cittaslow hill above the Volturno, turned by Franco Pepe's pizza into a destination for 800 covers a day in eighteenth-century rooms.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Visso
Province: Macerata
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Goriano Sicoli
Province: 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.
Ugento
Province: Lecce
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Fontanellato
Province: Parma
A Parma-plain town built around the Rocca Sanvitale, the moated fortress at its center.
Pescina
Province: 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.