About a month ago, my friend and I returned to Italy to try our luck, yet again, with this beautiful country. A year ago we mostly toured the northern half, a frantic meandering that even took us into the alps. This time, we did a loop around the south that started and ended in Rome and took us across rugged hills and valleys and into steep hilltop hamlets.
We were searching for, of course, the old and abandoned party of Italy: the decaying churches, overgrown villas, and ghost towns that dot the map. And we did find them. We also missed out on a few. But unlike the hazy, cloudy weather that predominated on our first trip, this year we had beautiful skies. Which made for some nice and hammy landscape photography, and that’s where we’ll start.
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The town of L’Aquila has this jaunty fountain in the middle of town.
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But ultimately, we are drawn to the old, arcane, and abandoned. Some of these are still out in the open, like an old gate knocker outside Naples,
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Or a palace that stood abandoned in the middle of a medieval town but now, to our surprise, had been cleaned up and repurposed as a very expressive museum space. This palace is best known for having some striking statues adjacent to the main door, one of which carved from the same rock the palace is built into.
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Finally, an “abandoned” church. On the side of the road, neatly gated with lights set into the ground to give it some mood lighting after dark, stood this edifice in suspended decay. You can see new mortar on the broken edge of the wall intended to keep it from crumbling any further.
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Next: the actually abandoned sights we saw, the sorts that require the usual amounts of sketchiness to access.
