Pacentro, Italy
I was talking to someone the other day and mentioned I’d just gotten back from visiting Italy, and he then asked me about the crowds. “It’s so touristy!” he said. “I want to go somewhere less crowded”. I get that, but the problem is not that there are too many tourists in Italy. The problem is that all the tourists are looking at the same instagram feeds while planning their itinerary.
One awesome thing I tried when planning my itinerary was how to work around the “Instagram affect”. So I googled “Less visited parts of Italy”. I discovered one of the least visited regions (by American tourists) is the region just east of Rome: the region of Abruzzo. So I checked it out. It looked beautiful — Lots of cool hilltop towns and lots and lots of mountains begging to be hiked and explored. So then I googled “most interesting places to see in Abruzzo”. And that sort of planning made for a wonderful time for us. Planning the itinerary this way, we discovered one of my very favorite towns (perched on a mountainside) called Pacentro. It was a friendly place for tourists, but not overrun by tourists at all. I heard no English conversation at all. If there were visitors, they were mostly Italian.
The problem is not that there are too many tourists. The problem is that the tourists are all looking at the same Instagram feeds while planning their itinerary.
This town is ancient, with narrow, stone streets winding their way up the mountainside to the castle. In the old part of town (where we stayed), there were no cars allowed on the streets (hard to fit a car on a 6’ wide “street”!) Joy and I loved this place. In the morning, we’d open the windows and hear the jovial conversation of neighbors. When we’d come back in the evening, we’d grab something to cook at the local (very small) grocery store and then go back home and cook dinner. But then — in Italy, after dinner there is a ritual: the passeggiata. This is when the whole town walks around and meets their friends at one of the cafe’s for a coffee or a glass of wine. Joy and I walked across town to the small park overlooking a large valley below, and then slowly made our way back home, passing the main piazza filled with people sitting, chatting, and laughing quietly. Understand, this is not a nightly “party”. They’re not at all being loud. They’re just all seemingly enjoying each other. In Pacentro, I heard no TV on at all. As an American, if I were home at 8:00 PM, I’d be watching Netflix. Instead, these people were sitting around the fountain in the piazza, sitting on doorsteps, sitting in outdoor cafe’s — all just spending time with each other. This seemed really beautiful to me. I’m an introvert, but even I could recognize the beauty in this ritual. I loved Pacentro.
So the first and one of the most important lessons on trip planning was this: find the most beautiful of the less visited areas of wherever you’re traveling to. Planning like that scored big time for Joy and I. The last week of our trip, we threw out all this reasoning and lived to regret it big time. More on that next.
