The hook
Italy's empty quarter, an hour from Rome: the highest Apennine peaks over a steppe-like plateau nicknamed "little Tibet", ruined mountaintop castles, cliff-hung hermitages, and the last wild bears and wolves in the peninsula's spine.
01Why it's worth it
Abruzzo is the region Italians themselves keep naming when asked what the country undervalues. A third of it is protected parkland, and the Gran Sasso massif is the showpiece: Corno Grande (the Apennines' highest summit) above Campo Imperatore, a vast high plain where scenes of spaghetti westerns and The Name of the Rose were shot, with the photogenic ruin of Rocca Calascio — a 10th-century watchtower-castle at 1,400 m — on its rim. Below sit stone villages like Santo Stefano di Sessanio and Scanno, cliff hermitages where a hermit pope once lived, and further south the Abruzzo National Park shelters Marsican brown bears found nowhere else on earth. It is the Trentino experience without the crowds or the prices, and the food — arrosticini (skewered lamb), mountain cheeses, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo — is its own argument.
02How to experience it
Drive: base around Santo Stefano di Sessanio or L'Aquila, walk Campo Imperatore and up to Rocca Calascio for sunset, and hike a stretch under Corno Grande. Add the hermitages of the Majella and, for wildlife, the beech forests of the Abruzzo National Park at dawn. Summer for the high trails; eat arrosticini by the dozen.
From the locals
Italians volunteer it unprompted and twice over: "l'Abruzzo è drammaticamente sottovalutato — l'entroterra è pieno di villaggi pittoreschi, con castelli, eremi e monasteri arroccati," one wrote; another: "l'Abruzzo ha gli Appennini che contano… il Gran Sasso. Una marea di posti strepitosi." Dramatically underrated; a sea of stunning places.