Mountain towns
Mountain towns in Molise
14 towns
Towns inside a named range: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Apennines, the Pollino, the Aspromonte. All above 500 meters and half above 800, where the season decides the trip.
The towns
Capracotta
Province: Isernia · 1,421 m
At 1,421 meters one of the highest communes of the Apennines, where a reported 2.56 meters of snow fell in about 18 hours in March 2015.
Pescopennataro
Province: Isernia · 1,190 m
An Alto Molise stone village at 1,190 meters, the paese della pietra e degli abeti, above a rare high-altitude white-fir forest.
Frosolone
Province: Isernia · 894 m
A 900-meter blade-making town in the Matese foothills, called Italy's Toledo for the knives and scissors forged here since the 1800s.
Ferrazzano
Province: Campobasso · 872 m
A hilltop borgo at 872 meters above Campobasso, called the Sentinel of Molise, where Robert De Niro's great-grandparents lived before sailing in 1887.
Macchiagodena
Province: Isernia · 868 m
Molise's white truffle capital: a 1,660-resident hilltop borgo at 868m in the Apennine middle Molise, with intact medieval streets and 30+ active truffle hunters working the surrounding oak forests, the Molise white truffle harvest running October-December.
Roccamandolfi
Province: Isernia · 850 m
At 850 meters at the foot of Monte Miletto, a Matese village of brigand legends, Lombard ruins, and a Tibetan bridge over the Callora canyon.
Agnone
Province: Isernia · 840 m
At 840 meters, town of the pontifical bell foundry and the fire procession that lights its streets every Christmas Eve.
Castel del Giudice
Province: Isernia · 800 m
An Alto Molise borgo of 305 residents at 800m that rebuilt an abandoned schoolhouse as a diffuse hotel and recovered 5,000 ancient apple trees into an organic-orchard cooperative.
Oratino
Province: Campobasso · 780 m
A stonemason borgo at 780 meters above the Biferno, with a square tower on a limestone spur that an earthquake in 1456 left standing alone.
Castel San Vincenzo
Province: Isernia · 749 m
A 749-meter village near the Volturno source, sharing ground with one of medieval Europe's most powerful abbeys and a ninth-century frescoed crypt.
Pizzone
Province: Isernia · 724 m
A 300-person Mainarde village at 724 meters, above the Volturno springs.
Campobasso
Province: Campobasso · 701 m
Molise's regional capital and the smallest in Italy, 48,000 residents at 701m on a wooded Apennine ridge, with a centro storico that climbs the hillside in stone-paved switchbacks.
Sepino
Province: Campobasso · 698 m
A hilltop borgo at 698 meters at the foot of the Matese, two kilometers above the Roman Saepinum, the open-air city the sheep tracks built.
Ripalimosani
Province: Campobasso · 640 m
A sandstone-ridge village at 640 meters above the Biferno valley, the historic land of the funai rope makers and a Tintilia wine commune.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Verucchio
Province: Rimini
A spur over the lower Marecchia valley, cradle of the Villanovan civilization and birthplace of the Malatesta lordship of Romagna.
Capranica
Province: Viterbo
A medieval hill town on the old Via Cassia, taken by the Anguillara family in 1305 and remembered as the place Petrarch stayed in 1337.
Kastelruth
Province: Bolzano
South Tyrolean village on a shelf below the Sciliar, eighty-two-metre bell tower over the square, home of the Kastelruther Spatzen.
Bagnara di Romagna
Province: Ravenna
A 22-meter plain commune in the Bassa Romagna, the only fully preserved medieval castrum surviving in the Romagna lowlands.
Rocca Imperiale
Province: Cosenza
Frederick II's Hohenstaufen fortress at the Calabria–Basilicata border, a Borgo più Bello d'Italia perched on a hill above the Ionian coast, with the castello at the summit and the locally-grown limone di Rocca Imperiale IGP scenting the orchards.