Abruzzo
& the Hill Town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio
Santo Stefano di Sessanio, Abruzzo, Italy
Italy’s Last Frontier
In an era of mass tourism with Italy amongst the world’s most popular destinations, it can come as a surprise to find that there are still entire regions in the country which are virtually unknown to the international traveller. But such is the case with the region of Abruzzo, nestling in the centre of the peninsular to the east of Rome.
I first came to Italy in 1980 with the usual expectations of a place steeped in history, with art virtually growing out of the ground, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. But having been prepared by manicured images of Tuscany and exuberantly baroque Rome, I imagined that nature here had long been thoroughly tamed. So it was with considerable surprise that within 10 days of my arrival in the country, I found myself perched high on spectacular mountains, looking across a vast landscape of forests and ravines with medieval hill towns crowning impossibly steep ridges into the distance.
Medieval village, Abruzzo, Italy
I was there because I’d calculated that if I followed the main tourist routes to Florence and Rome, there was a good chance that the gear strapped onto my motorcycle might not survive - so why not just go down the middle of the map and see what happened? What happened was that I fell in love with Italy, and in particular with central Italy, and that experience of looking out over the valley of L’Aquila with the Gran Sasso massif snow capped in the distance, has remained with me ever since.
Gran Sasso d'Italia, Apennines, Abruzzo
And this brings me to the story of another motorcyclist who, back in 1999, also had an epiphany in this wild corner of the Abruzzo, which in his case has had the most fruitful of consequences. His name is Daniele Kihlgren and what it led to was among other things the invention of a new kind of tourist accommodation – the “albergo diffuso” or “distributed hotel”, which in the last 15 or more years has become increasingly common throughout Italy. This is a hotel made up of rooms that are in different locations within a town or village, and the place Daniele came to that day was Santo Stefano di Sessanio.
Santo Stefano di Sessanio
A spectacularly sited and completely unspoiled gem of medieval architecture high up in the mountains, it is our starting accommodation for Academy Travel’s “Abruzzo, Puglia and Matera - Mysteries of the Mezzogiorno” tour in September 2024.
The streets of Santo Stefano di Sessanio
Despite his Nordic-sounding name, Daniele is fully Italian, born to a wealthy Milanese family which made its money in the cement industry, ironically given his later crusade to save the dying hill towns of central and southern Italy from the blight of excessive cement. What came to him on that occasion was that unspoilt places like Santo Stefano, far from being the desolate backwaters that they had traditionally been seen as, were an extraordinary resource which could be exploited not only commercially but also aesthetically.
The trick was, though, that they had to be saved from ugly modernisation, so having gone from owning one house in the town to eight, and then to a quarter of the town, he went to the local Comune and proposed a deal. In return for them putting a blanket ban on new building, he would invest serious money – after five years of work it would come to around 4.5 million euro – and create an “albergo diffuso”, each lovingly restored residence being a unit in this new concept of hotel.
In a village surrounded by breathtaking views, essentially unchanged since it was an outpost of the Medici when they controlled the sheep industry here in Renaissance times, the result is quite extraordinary - ‘Sextantio Albergo Diffuso’ is a brand new boutique concept with hotel rooms spread around the village, proudly showing the signs of Santo Stefano’s 500 years of history yet providing all the luxury a discerning guest would want.
Hotel room of Sextantio Albergo Diffuso
The hotel's private dining room, Locanda Sotto gli Archi, serves Abruzzese cuisine in a rustic building. The speciality pasta of the area is rustled up in the kitchen and a breakfast spread of home-made pastries, tarts and cakes is laid out in the bar every morning. And for aperitifs and antipasti, the La Cantinone offers a cosy wine cellar and a great place relax in front of the fireplace.
Dinning room - Locanda Sotto gli Archi
And in a country of relatively frequent earthquakes, it turns out that Daniele’s insistence on traditional restoration techniques based on medieval technology has far better outcomes than the reinforced cement jobs that Italy is unfortunately so fond of.
And Daniele didn’t stop at Santo Stefano. He started buying up and restoring houses in other semi-abandoned villages and soon the mayors of half the hill towns from Lazio down to Calabria were knocking at his door to find out about this new model of tourism that has the potential to revitalise some of the poorest areas of the peninsular, while also turning the tide against the creeping spread of insensate ugliness that has blighted so much of this beautiful country.
It was a win-win situation and now Daniele has the satisfaction of knowing that he set in motion a trend that has not only opened up new economic opportunities but done it in a way that has added even more to Italy’s already rich cultural patrimony.
Abruzzo, Italy's Unsung Destination
So what is it that sets the Abruzzo apart from the more domesticated regions of Italy, and what does it have to offer the traveller who comes here?
To begin with it’s the geography, wild mountains and vast forests where both the native bear and wolf have been coaxed back from the edge of extinction, though you won’t be meeting them on this tour. And no doubt connected to this is the complete absence of mass tourism together with the persistence of traditions and a way of life that have disappeared elsewhere.
Scanno, Abruzzo, Italy - the heart shaped lake
Geographically isolated from the rest of Italy by its rugged terrain and to a large extent above the altitude where the olive and the vine can be cultivated, the economy here has since time immemorial been based on the sheep, and in particular an annual migration called the “transumanza” (transhumance in English).
What this meant for the local inhabitants was an annual migration in which at the end of the summer all the men would gather together on a certain day and with upwards of 40,000 sheep start the long journey down from the high country to Puglia where they would exchange their cheese and other sheep products for the tools that needed replacing, returning in spring of the following year to their homes. The women and children would of course be left behind for the severe mountain winter and it must have often happened that babies were born who would only be introduced to their fathers the following spring
This has produced a much tougher culture than elsewhere in Italy together with a resilience and an attachment to ancient practices that in many cases predate Christianity. Emblematic is the spring snake festival in Cocullo in which the still sleepy reptiles are gathered in large numbers and draped over the cult image of the patron saint as he’s processed through the streets (pictured below).
While as a mass migration, the transumanza declined steeply following Italian unification in 1860 – with the granting of property rights to small farmers, it was no longer possible for the flocks to cut an indiscriminate swathe through the flat lands of the south. However, its cultural legacy remained, and there have even been some recent attempts to revive it on a reduced scale, part of a general re-discovery in the poorer parts of Italy of the richness of their peasant heritage.
Indeed, the “tratture”, the traditional paths that this sheep migration used to follow, replete with their isolated churches built for the blessing of the flocks, were included on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites in 2019. And it’s in this context that Daniele Kihlgren and his crusade to valorize the vernacular architecture of the Italian Mezzogiorno can best be seen.
Gran Sasso National Park in Abruzzo - the Santa Maria della Pieta church
You can read more about Daniele Kihlgren in a recent article by the Independent: www.independent.co.uk/saviour-of-santo-stefano
Exploring Abruzzo
On our upcoming tour, we stay five nights in the Abruzzo - long enough to get a very satisfying taste of this little known region, truly Italy’s last frontier. Included in our itinerary are what has to be one of the most spectacular castles in the country at Calascio:
Rocca Calascio, Abruzzo
Some amazing frescoes in the Oratorio of Bominaco:
The Roman ghost town of Peltuinum built on the Via Claudia in the valley below Santo Stefano:
Ancient roman city of Peltuinum
And the elegant regional city of Sulmona, birthplace of the poet Ovid and our base for three nights - before we too take the sheep paths down to Puglia and the south:
Piazza Garibaldi, Sulmona
But that’s not the last we have to do with our friend Daniele, because our final accommodation on this tour is in Matera where he has established his second “albergo diffuso”, which is if anything even more extraordinary than Santo Stefano. But that’s a story for another time!
ABRUZZO, PUGLIA & MATERA
Mysteries of the Mezzogiorno
Known as the Mezzogiorno – also the Italian word for midday – and once a part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Italian peninsula’s southernmost regions are exceedingly rich in Greco-Roman, Norman, French and Spanish cultural residues.
This new 16-day tour in September 2024, led by artist and historian Neil Moore, takes you through the less-visited Abruzzo region and uncovers the many layers of picturesque Puglia and the ancient Sassi cave complex of Matera.
