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Immersion Travel

Plan your experience with us in molise, it's time to put your hands in... pasta.

OLIVE HARVEST

Immersed in the Molise countryside, between nature and breath-taking landscapes, you can live a sensational experience by participating in the first person in the collection and milling of the olives, two essential stages of the production of extra virgin olive oil. Professionals in the sector will indicate the best techniques for the collection and illustrating the technological evolution over the years. At the end, tasting of the “new” oil and typical lunch.

MAKE AUTHENTIC PASTA

Discovering Molise is a pleasure for all the senses, especially for the taste. The culinary tradition reigns supreme in Italy and above all on our territory, it is an important cultural experience.

High quality local products create a deep bond with the identity of this area and through an interesting cooking course you can deepen the roots of Molise and learn the secrets of the Molise culinary tradition.

TRUFFLE HUNT

A guided tour through the woods of the Molise hills, where priceless treasures are hidden, for a memorable truffle hunting excursion with dogs. The most intricate secrets on the truffle will be revealed, including insights into the environment, their biological cycle and how truffle dogs are trained. Lunch with typical dishes of the Molise tradition, the absolute protagonist will be the truffle.

EDUCATIONAL FARM

To deepen the knowledge on the rural world and to make an exciting tour in farms capable of involving large, small, groups and school groups. From the cultivation of vegetables, to breeding to reach the table, a path to discover the never-ending traditions of genuine products like those of the past.

CHEESE FACTORY WORK

Live the passion of a millennial craft. An immersion in the vaporous and fragrant atmospheres of the artisan workshops for the production of raw milk cheeses, to discover the history of Caciocavallo and traditional Molise cheeses and experience the world of transhumance.

SWEET DECORATION

All you need is only fantasy! In pastry shops, supported by experts in the sector, it is possible to create unique masterpieces with your own hands. Techniques and recipes will be taught to prepare quality desserts, thanks to the authenticity of the raw materials and decorated in an incredible way.

HANDMADE PRODUCTS MADE IN THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

Molise offers its visitors the opportunity to carry out experiential tourism thanks to the availability of numerous companies that allow everyone to work their products alongside expert staff. Visit farms where you can participate in the collection of the products of the land, work on cheeses and knead flour, as well as visit the stables to get to know the animals.

The oil mills where you can visit olive fields, the cellars with vineyards and fine wines, craft breweries, companies famous for the production of mushrooms and truffles that let you discover their characteristics and their link with tradition.

Young and old people can have fun inside educational farms and in confectionery companies where to decorate tasty chocolate desserts or in a bakery to knead bread.

Engaging experiences that allow you to understand the great value of artisan products made as they once were and made special by their authenticity.

Molise Map and Travel Guide

Guide to Visiting the Molise Region of Italy

Antonia Serena Bove/EyeEm/GettyImages

The Molise is a region of central Italy that's not often visited by foreigners, but it offers some astounding vistas from a hilly region that has a border on the Adriatic Sea. The Molise is noted for its cheeses, its regional cuisine, and its rural atmosphere.

Our Molise map shows the cities and towns the tourist should visit. The  Abruzzo region  lies to the north,  Lazio  to the west, and  Campania  and  Puglia  to the south. The Molise's many rivers flow from the Apennines to the Adriatic, while the  Volturno  flows into the Tyrrhenian Sea after crossing the region of Campania.

Molise Introduction and Main Cities

The Molise is undoubtedly one of the least visited regions of Italy. Vacations in the region are often combined with a visit to the Abruzzo to the north since the landscapes are similar. The area is mountainous and is sometimes referred to as "between the mountains and the sea" as the small region contains both a little seacoast and a mountainous center. The attractions are decidedly rural.

The regional capitals are  Isernia  and  Campobasso  shown on the Molise map in bold type. Both cities can be reached by train:

• Campobasso  is known for its engraved cutlery, its religious procession and festival in early June, and the National School for Carabinieri. The upper part of town is the older part and has a couple of Romanesque churches and a castle at the top. From Campobasso, there is a bus service to some of the smaller villages nearby.
• Isernia  was once the Samnite town of  Aesernia  and claims to be the  first capital of Italy . Evidence of a Paleolithic village was also found at Isernia and finds are displayed in a modern museum. Today Isernia is famous for its lace and its onions. Isernia has a small historic center, the highlight of which is the 14th century Fontana Fraterna, made from pieces of Roman ruins.

Molise Towns of Interest

• Termoli  is a fishing port with a long, sandy beach. The town has pale stone buildings and an interesting 13th-century cathedral. Termoli has a castle, good views, and great seafood restaurants. It can be reached by train on the coastal rail line.
• Campomarino  is another seaside resort, is smaller and sometimes less crowded in summer than Termoli.
• Agnone  is a charming small town known for its bell factories. For the past thousand years, Agnone has made bells for the Vatican and many other countries. Today one foundry still operates and has a small museum. Agnone is also home to a number of coppersmiths with shops along the main street.
• Acquaviva Collercroce  is an interesting town established by Slavs that still maintains some Slavic traditions and has remnants of its Slavic origins, including its dialect.
• Larino  is a small town in a pretty setting among hills and olive groves. It has an impressive cathedral dating from 1319 and some good 18th-century frescoes in the nearby church of San Francesco. There's some good art in the  Palazzo Comunale . There are also remains of the ancient Samnite town near the station including an amphitheater and ruins of villas.
• Ururi  is an old Albanian town that still maintains some Albanian traditions as is  Portocannone  nearby.
• Pietrabbondante  has extensive Samnite ruins including foundations of temples and a well-preserved Greek theater.
• Pescolanciano  is topped by a picturesque 13th-century castle,  Castello D'Allessandro , with a pretty arcade. There's another castle in the old village of  Carpinone , 8 km from Isernia.
• Cero ai Volturno  is the best castle in the Molise region. Originating in the 10th century, it was rebuilt in the 15th century. The castle is perched on a huge rock towering over the town and is accessible by a narrow path.
• Scapoli  is known for its summer bagpipe ( zampogna ) market where you'll find a great display of bagpipes traditionally used by shepherds of the Molise and neighboring Abruzzo region. Shepherds still play the bagpipes at Christmas time, both in their hometowns and in Naples and Rome.
• Venafro  is one of the oldest towns in the Molise and produces good olive oil. Its oval-shaped piazza was originally the Roman Amphitheater and the arcades are incorporated into the front doors of the houses. The National Museum, in the former convent of  Santa Chiara , houses other Roman remains. There are several interesting churches and castle ruins with some nice frescoes. Leading up to the town are Cyclopean walls.
• Ferrazzano  is a hill-top medieval village with a good historic center and a megalithic wall 3 km long. It's also the home of actor Robert de Niro and holds film fests in his honor.
• Saepinum  was a Roman town in a remote and beautiful setting, making it one of the most impressive examples of a provincial Roman town you can visit in Italy. The site is surrounded by defensive walls, built in diamond patterns, with four gates leading into the town. You can see some of the original road paving, the forum with civic buildings and shops, a temple, baths, fountains, a theater, and houses. There is also a museum with findings from the excavations.

Getting Around the Molise Region

Larger cities of the Molise are connected by a train line to Naples, Rome, Sulmona, and Pescara. You can generally find bus transportation from village to village, although they are mostly timed to work and school schedules, and are likely to be inconvenient for the tourist. A rental or lease car is recommended.

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Far off the tourist track, Molise offers the best parts of Italy

The forgotten region feels like finding the buried heart of why travelers fell for italy in the first place.

MOLISE, Italy — Poor Molise, I used to think.

It is one of Italy’s 20 regions , but it seems to get fewer visitors than certain restaurants in Tuscany. To the extent it has any reputation at all, it is as an unremarkable backwoods. Dismissed by travel guidebooks. Overlooked by Italians. On the wooden Italy puzzle I bought for my son — a piece for every region — Molise is attached to Abruzzo.

Molise non esiste, the saying goes in Italian. Molise doesn’t exist.

But I realize now, after a week-long family road trip from our home in Rome , that these factors allow Molise to hide in the best way possible. In an era when Italy is so warped by tourism, when even the “off-the-beaten-path” itineraries lead you to crowded Instagram towns, visiting Molise feels like more than an antidote. It feels like finding the buried heart of why travelers fell for Italy in the first place.

I share all this with a bit of trepidation. We all want to hoard our secrets, preserve what feels special. And besides, Molise isn’t really conducive to a glossy sales pitch. It has no A-level bucket-list sites. It has some 20 miles of tidy coastline, a pittance by Italian standards. Its rugged, vast interior, with twisting roads and hills capped by medieval towns, doesn’t look much different from (ahem) Abruzzo.

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But look at that paragraph again. The sales pitch is hiding right there. Molise has lovely beaches without the touristy trinket shops; ancient towns that are gobsmacked and delighted to see a visitor; and beauty that would be extraordinary almost anywhere but this country. And to boot, it has breathtaking food with stuck-in-the-1980s prices.

There are towns with all sorts of surprises. Frosolone is a center for artisanal knives. Carpinone straddles a mountainside so sheer you would expect a ski lift. Agnone is the base for the world’s second-oldest family business, a foundry that makes bronze bells for the Vatican, and where visitors can walk through the factory floor, dusty and bustling, full of clay and wax casts and busts of popes.

Visiting Molise, it must be said, requires some commitment. Public transit scarcely exists; a rental car is a must. Patience, too, is a prerequisite. In Molise, Google Maps misfires. You’ll find yourself guided the wrong way down one-way roads. You’ll seek out restaurants only to find their listed opening hours are pure fiction. Eventually, in search of churches or cafes or ATMs, I put away my phone and just talked to people.

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Even Molise’s comparatively well-known sites seem uninterested in being discovered. Near the village of Sepino lies a field of archaeological ruins, a former Roman valley town, with the stone remains of an amphitheater and a colonnaded forum, a micro-Pompei. But the site is virtually unmarked from the main road. There are no tickets, no opening hours, no ropes keeping anything out of bounds — only a gorgeous spread of onetime grandeur, with wild sage growing all around, where our 4-year-old happily played hide-and-seek in the mazelike remains. Aside from three Belgians, he had the place to himself.

A respite from overtourism

It’s impossible to talk about the appeal of Molise without also talking about the state of tourism in Italy . It is, in short, a hot mess. So many of the country’s most famous places are postcards for the ills of overtourism. Crowds consume the walkways of the Colosseum ; drown out any sense of local life in central Venice ; flock to Sicily’s “White Lotus” location ; and choke off streets in Florence , including one alley where the crowd is inexplicably queuing for a panino.

Italy was too crowded even before the pandemic, and during the hiatus, a raft of leaders said it was time to create a more sustainable model. Naturally, nothing happened, and more people are visiting than ever before.

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Katie Parla, Rome-based cookbook author and tour guide, said visiting Rome is a “borderline required” experience in a lifetime. “But when you’re walking down the street,” she said, “it’s hard to tell who is local and who is not. In Molise, you’re in a place that is so authentically itself. Understanding Italy means going to places that haven’t lost anything due to the ramifications of tourism.”

Italy saw 48 million foreign visitors in the first six months this year, according to its central bank, which tracks international tourism. More than 3.6 million of those visitors ended up in Tuscany. Only 20,000 went to Molise, making it by far the country’s least visited region.

Until this trip, I had never been to Molise. But it’s a stand-in for my general Italy travel advice, which is: Trust the place you’ve never heard of. Up in those forgotten towns, on almost every hilltop in Lazio and Campania and inland Calabria, there are churches with 14th-century frescoes, town piazzas with 1 euro cafes and men playing cards, and almost inevitably some trattoria serving something great.

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That’s true in Molise, where several factors, including depopulation and the hollowed economy, make the wonders even more unlikely. These aren’t easy places to live; it’s so remote and craggy. The young, unable to find jobs, tend to flee to other regions. Molise’s population declines roughly 1 percent every year, according to national statistics .

“The almost total rurality of the Molise people is the origin of their defects and virtues,” the author Francesco Jovine wrote in his book “Viaggio nel Molise,” a travelogue that we received from our friend Stanislao de Marsanich, president of a park system that honors Italian authors.

Farm stays and cheesemaking

It dawned on me after a few days in Molise that the dearth of visitors bestows a deep benefit. We saw it in the attention, the energy and the affection gifted to visitors. Among the people whose jobs entail dealing with tourists, there was no fatigue or cynicism. This might be possible, too, in places with conveyor-belt tourism. But it’s far likelier in Molise.

We spent our first three nights in the region at Parco dei Buoi , an agriturismo, or farm stay, in the middle of olive groves and apricot trees. Such places are abundant in Italy, and you normally get a humble room and a good breakfast, maybe some mosquito bites. What we found at Parco dei Buoi was plenty of good food and also a near-instant family: Francesco Travaglini, Pia Mariani, their daughter, Giulia, soon departing for college in Milan, and their son, Gabriele.

Pia doted so joyfully on our 5-month-old that my wife, Lilian, and I had one morning almost entirely to ourselves. Giulia took our son to harvest tomatoes, which were turned by Pia into a pasta al pomodoro so sublime that the sugo didn’t even need cheese. We ate together at a table with local wine.

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Maybe that was a one-off, I thought, a special stroke of Molise luck. But then we found ourselves at a family-run cheese factory, Azienda Agricola Carmela Colavecchio, in the hills outside Campobasso. Carmela and Mario had prevailed several days earlier in a national competition for caciocavallo, the southern Italian cow’s milk cheese. Cheesemakers can be big deals in Italy, and many offer regular tours of their operations. Mario, a former hang-gliding instructor, said he gets many visitors at their farm, too, but given how it went — so unplanned and heartfelt — I found that hard to believe.

We saw the cheesemaking process, of course, led by his wife, Carmela. Then he invited us to walk with his sheep as they ambled to a pasture, led by volunteer shepherds. For a while, we were out there in the field, unsupervised, snacking on wild blackberries. We returned to find Mario wrapping up the day, and he invited us into his home. He played music for us. He introduced us to his friends. As the temperature dipped, he asked whether we wanted to meet his cows, and he grabbed a flannel jacket for our son that was about 12 sizes too big, wrapping it around him as they walked.

An eating ‘Field of Dreams’

Molise’s cuisine is heavy on meats, cheese and wild vegetables. On Google, the restaurants that serve them might have just a few blurry photos. But, more often than not, they are gems. One day we pulled off a highway to a little trattoria where you could smell the smoked meat even from the parking lot. The door hung open, just some string beads blocking the entrance, and inside a TV played the U.S. Open. We sat down to simple plates of pasta, served only with Parmigiano-Reggiano and a jar of chili flakes.

It was 7 euros per plate.

One Sunday evening, we found ourselves in a predicament. Our kids were tired, and we couldn’t find a place to eat. I called one restaurant: closed. Another restaurant: closed. Another restaurant: open, but only from 8 p.m. Our daughter would be getting tired by then.

A little panicky, I called a nearby agriturismo, Essentia Dimora Rurale, a place Francesco had recommended, and asked whether they by chance served dinner. The place was 10 minutes away by car.

“Let me ask the chef if there’s space for tonight,” the voice on the other line said.

I waited a moment.

“Okay. We have one more table,” he said.

I didn’t ask any other questions.

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We arrived to find a farmstead that opened up to a vast field, soccer goals set up on one side, a playground and tables arranged under string lights. Beyond, the rolling hills unfolded in shades of brown and green, and a vignette of pink framed the sky. In the distance, you could see a little village, the evening lights turning on.

As we walked in, feeling as if we had entered an eating “Field of Dreams,” the agriturismo owner, Salvatore Zeoli, offered to guide the evening’s diners — there would be about 20 — deeper into his farmland. He talked about the tomatoes and the grains and led us to a field of chickpeas. This was his way of introducing what would turn out to be a celestial meal, every ingredient from Molise.

There under the lights, we ate spicy salami, caciocavallo, eggplant fritters and prosciutto where even the fat tasted good. We ate a soup of chickpeas and carrots that looked homemade but tasted like something unattainable. We ate a pasta of ancient grains with pesto and tomato, spiked with a lively olive oil. We ate pampanella, a spiced, tender pork with peppers. The meal stretched for two hours, then nearly three, and we ended up breaking all the bedtime boundaries and laughing about not caring. Our 4-year-old, after finishing his pasta and playing in the field, fell asleep in the stroller. Our baby fell asleep in the carrier. By the end, it was just eight or nine tables in the near-darkness, and Lilian remarked that what made the meal so special wasn’t any particular bite, but rather the unabashed simplicity. No dollops of any precious delicacy. No eye toward plating.

Just food that you would want to eat.

Before we left, Salvatore gave us two bags of pasta — a parting gift for every guest, he said. We carried our children into the car and headed over potholes and pitch-black country roads.

If Google sent me headlong down any one-way roads I didn’t know, there was nobody else around.

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Visit The Beautiful Italian Region That 'Doesn't Exist'

Molise is considered Italy's best-kept secret. Often dubbed "the region that doesn't exist," Molise is frequently overlooked.

Aysia Morton • Feb 26, 2024

Tucked away like a well-guarded secret in the embrace of southern Italy , Molise emerges as the country’s mysterious treasure trove. Often referred to as the “region that doesn’t exist,” it remains unvisited for the most part, even among Italians. While the world openly appreciates Tuscany’s beauty, Umbria’s charm, and Sicily’s allure, Molise quietly awaits discovery.

Molise is Italy’s uncharted territory. Unfazed by bustling crowds and the rush of tourism , the region invites travelers to unearth its enigmas, traverse medieval hilltop villages, and savor the flavors of a rich and often overlooked Italian heritage.

A Landscape of Rolling Hills and Centuries of History

Despite being Italy’s second smallest region, Molise packs a diverse array of landscapes and attractions within its approximate 4,400 square kilometers. From the Apennine mountain range into the Adriatic Sea, the terrain of the region encompasses rolling hills, valleys, and charming coastal towns. Travelers can expect a slower pace of life during their stay. Forget the hustle and bustle of big cities, and instead, embrace the tranquil pace.

Molise’s rich history dates back to ancient times, with evidence of human settlement dating back to the Paleolithic era. Over the centuries, the region has been invaded by various civilizations, including the Romans, Slavs, Spaniards, and Barbary pirates. Each left its mark on Molise’s cultural heritage.

Today, its landscape consists of medieval hilltop villages, cobblestone streets, centuries-old churches, and crumbling fortresses. They seem frozen in time, offering visitors a glimpse into the region’s storied past. Many believe its ancient architecture rivals what you’ll find in Rome and other renowned Italian destinations .

Cuisine in Molise

Molise’s culinary scene is a testament to its agricultural heritage. Locally sourced ingredients take center stage in traditional dishes. The region’s cuisine encompasses everything from hearty soups, meats, and stews to handmade pasta and artisanal cheeses.

No visit to Molise would be complete without sampling its award-winning wines . The region’s vineyards are vast among hills and sunny valleys. For this reason, the region produces a variety of indigenous grape varieties, including Tintilia and Aglianico. Visitors can expect unique flavors in their wines, whether sipping a robust red or a crisp white.

Sustainable Tourism

In recent years, the region has garnered attention for its commitment to sustainable tourism and eco-friendly practices. From agritourism initiatives that promote farm-to-table dining to eco-friendly accommodations amid pristine natural surroundings, Molise is leading the way in responsible travel. Molise is Italy’s hidden treasure, and the region remains a well-kept secret.

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