Roscigno Vecchia, Italy's Abandoned Ghost Village in Cilento

There are places you do not visit, you cross on tiptoe. Roscigno Vecchia, on the slopes of the Alburni mountains in the province of Salerno, is one of them. An entire stone village still standing but empty, abandoned at the start of the twentieth century when a landslide forced the inhabitants to rebuild the settlement a little further north. Local people have called it "the village that walks" for centuries, because the unstable ground has repeatedly pushed it to move.

The heart of the village is Piazza Giovanni Nicotera, a cobbled expanse shaded by great trees, with a circular stone fountain and a water trough at its centre. All around, the low houses with their doorways, external stairs and ovens: a rural layout frozen more than a century ago. On the raised side stands the eighteenth-century church of San Nicola di Bari, now closed but still evocative.

So as not to lose the memory of this world, a Museum of Rural Life has been set up in some of the rooms of the former town hall and the old presbytery. Room after room, through tools, photographs and everyday objects, the cycles of work are recounted: the vine and wine, the olive tree and oil, wheat and bread, wool and cheese. It is the most concrete way to understand who lived here before the great silence.

Roscigno Vecchia has been part of the UNESCO heritage since 1998, together with the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park. And yet it stays off the mass routes: no queues, no stalls, often only the cats that have taken over the once-inhabited spaces. This very absence of crowds is its most precious gift, to be respected by walking slowly and taking away nothing but photographs.

It can be visited all year round, but spring and early autumn offer the best light and pleasant temperatures for the walk. From here you can easily reach the other inland villages of the Cilento, far from the busier coast. A slow, authentic alternative to the crowded destinations of the South, where travel becomes listening.

Getting there

Roscigno Vecchia is in the Cilento National Park, in the province of Salerno, and is best reached by car. From the A2 motorway you can exit at Battipaglia or at Atena Lucana and continue along the inland roads to Roscigno Nuova, from which you reach the old village; it is best to aim for the new town so that sat-navs don't send you onto rough tracks. By public transport the reference is the train as far as Eboli and then the bus, but services are infrequent. The reference airports are those of Salerno and Naples.