Learn about Abruzzo

Abruzzo rises from a short Adriatic coastline into the Apennines' highest peaks, the Gran Sasso and Majella massifs, with roughly a third of the region's territory protected across several national and regional parks.

Abruzzo's Italic tribes -- the Vestini, Marsi, and Peligni among them -- resisted Roman conquest fiercely enough to help trigger the Social War of 91-88 BC over Roman citizenship. Centuries later, the region's mountain isolation gave rise to transhumance, the seasonal droving of sheep along ancient routes between highland summer pasture and coastal winter grazing, an economy and way of life that shaped Abruzzo for over two thousand years.

Abruzzo's cuisine runs on what its mountains and transhumance shepherds once provided -- arrosticini (skewered mutton grilled over embers), saffron from the Navelli plain, and pasta alla chitarra, cut with a guitar-string tool. Sulmona's confetti (sugared almond) workshops and Cocullo's centuries-old snake-handling procession, the Festa dei Serpari, both point to a region whose traditions run deeper and stranger than most.

Abruzzo's climate splits sharply between a mild Mediterranean coast and a genuinely alpine interior -- Campo Imperatore, the high plain beneath the Gran Sasso, is nicknamed «Piccolo Tibet» for its harsh, snow-bound winters, while Pescara and the Adriatic coast stay far milder year-round.