Villages at risk of disappearing: Italy's ghost towns and abandoned places

To speak of abandoned villages and ghost towns in Italy is to travel through an atlas of landslides, earthquakes and migrations. There are hundreds of historic centres emptied out during the twentieth century: houses left with the furniture inside, roofless churches, alleys that still hold their plaster. They are not stage sets built for tourism, but precise scars of dated events. Understanding their causes helps you visit them with respect and read, behind the fascination, a story of the land's fragility that still concerns the Apennines and the inland areas of the South today.

The Basilicata of the badlands

The best-known case is Basilicata. Craco sits on a clay hill among the badlands of the Matera area: after the landslide of 1963, the flood of 1972 and the earthquake of 1980, the last inhabitants were moved down to the valley and the old town, which had held almost two thousand people, was never repopulated. Today it can only be visited on a guided tour and wearing a helmet, because its structural stability remains precarious. It has been the set of films such as Quantum of Solace and The Passion of the Christ, and it has been on the World Monuments Fund list since 2010. Not far away, along the badlands of Carlo Levi's internal exile, Aliano tells the slow version of the same phenomenon: not sudden abandonment, but the depopulation that empties a community decade after decade.

Sicily preserves the largest ghost town in Italy. On the night of 14 January 1968 the Belice earthquake razed several municipalities to the ground: Poggioreale Antica was evacuated and rebuilt in the valley, leaving standing the main street, the theatre, the noble palaces and the facades of the houses, frozen at that date. Tornatore shot some scenes of Cinema Paradiso here. After decades of decay, part of the village has been made safe with PNRR funds and in 2026 it reopened to visitors in a regulated way. It is proof that a ghost town is not necessarily condemned to oblivion.

Earthquakes and landslides

In Abruzzo, above the Sangro valley, there's Buonanotte: the old name of the municipality now called Montebello sul Sangro. Depopulation, begun in the 1950s and accelerated by landslides, led to definitive abandonment in 1969. Inside the houses, furniture and everyday objects remain; for some years now the project "Buonanotte Contemporanea" has brought art and installations among the ruins, a way to keep memory alive without pretending at a reconstruction.

In the Cilento, Roscigno Vecchia was declared uninhabitable in the early twentieth century because of the instability of the ground and rebuilt higher up. The square with its fountain and church remained intact, so much so that it is considered a "museum village" of early twentieth-century rural Italy: for years a single inhabitant remained there, the involuntary keeper of the place. In Lazio, near Viterbo, Celleno Vecchia rises on a spur of red tuff: earthquakes, landslides and malaria pushed the population to found the new settlement, and today the old village has been restored and can be visited, with the Orsini castle looking out over the badlands.

The mutilated villages

Alongside the entirely emptied towns are the mutilated villages: centres still alive that guard an abandoned quarter. In Tursi, in Basilicata, the Rabatana of Saracen origin still clings to the badlands while the town has moved down to the valley; the same happens at Sutera, in Sicily, with the Arab quarter of the Rabato beneath the crag. In Irpinia, Bisaccia bears the marks of the 1980 earthquake, which moved most of life to the new town and left the medieval village around the ducal castle in silence.

Not only abandonment

Not all the stories end in abandonment. Civitacampomarano, a Molise village that was almost emptied, has reversed course to become a capital of street art with the CVTà festival. Mombaldone, in Piedmont, holds on as a small nucleus of sandstone on the Bormida. And Venzone, in Friuli, razed to the ground by the 1976 earthquake, was rebuilt stone by stone with anastylosis techniques: the exact reverse of the ghost town.

The list could go on with places not covered here: Romagnano al Monte and Apice Vecchia in Campania, Pentidattilo in Calabria, Balestrino in Liguria, Consonno in Brianza, or Fabbriche di Careggine, which re-emerges from the Tuscan artificial lake when it is drained. Visit them in the shoulder seasons, when the badlands are dry and the light is raking: spring and autumn remain the best periods to walk them, without the heat that cracks the clay or the winter mud.

Practical guides

• How to get to Ischia: ferries, hydrofoils, flights and transport
• What to see in Ischia in 2 days: itinerary through spas, villages and coastal trails
• Where to stay in Ischia: areas, accommodation and practical tips
• Where to eat in Ischia: best restaurants, trattorias and seafood guide