Discover Molise

Introduction

Molise is the second-smallest Italian region and the least populated after Aosta Valley, with about 290,000 people. It only became a region in its own right in 1963, when it was separated from Abruzzo, which is part of why it has never had a strong outside identity.

Italians make a running joke of this — il Molise non esiste, "Molise doesn't exist" — and the region has learned to use the line itself. What is actually here is a compressed version of central Italy: Apennine mountains in the west, a 35 km strip of Adriatic coast in the east, and between them a landscape of ridge-top villages, beech forest and the broad grassy droving roads that once carried sheep to Puglia.

It holds one of the oldest human sites in Europe at Isernia, a Roman town at Saepinum so complete and so unvisited that it is usually free to walk into, and a bell foundry at Agnone that has been in the same family since roughly the year 1000.

Geography

Molise runs from the Apennines to the Adriatic in about 80 km. Most of it is mountain or steep hill, it has only 35 km of coast, and it is crossed by the broad grassy droving roads that shaped its settlement.

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History

Molise was Samnite before it was anything else, and the Samnites came closer to defeating Rome than any Italian people. Afterwards it was a periphery of other people's kingdoms for two thousand years, and became a region in its own right only in 1963.

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Culture

Molise's culture is pastoral and archaic: bagpipes still made and played, fire festivals in December, iron-framed religious tableaux carried through Campobasso, and villages that have spoken Albanian or Croatian for five hundred years.

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Climate Patterns

Mediterranean on its short coast, and genuinely continental and snowy inland — Capracotta is among the snowiest inhabited places in Italy, an hour from a beach.

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Food & Traditional Cuisine

Molise eats like the shepherding country it is: mutton, sheep's cheese, hand-rolled pasta and pork cured in the mountains — plus a serious quantity of truffle that mostly leaves the region under someone else's label.

Read the full Food & Traditional Cuisine guide →