Compound
The towns under 1,000 people, above 500 meters, with a train station
Three filters at once: fewer than 1,000 residents, 500 meters or higher, an active railway station. The catalogue holds 7 such towns, all shown.
Three filters, applied at once, that almost nothing survives: fewer than a thousand residents, five hundred meters of altitude, a working railway station. The catalogue holds only a handful of such towns.
They exist mostly where mountain lines were built through country that later emptied. The train arrives anyway, which is the whole romance of them.
- 1.Monteviasco12 residentsVarese · LombardyA near-abandoned mountain frazione of Curiglia con Monteviasco at 928 metres above the Veddasca valley — historically reached only by an aerial cable-car since 1989 (since suspended) or a 1,400-step stone staircase, with permanent population in the single digits.
- 2.Anversa degli Abruzzi312 residentsL'Aquila · AbruzzoAt 604 meters above the Sagittario Gorges, the cliff village where D'Annunzio set La Fiaccola sotto il moggio in 1905.
- 3.Goriano Sicoli511 residentsL'Aquila · AbruzzoAt 720 meters in the Subequana valley, the medieval village M.C. Escher drew in 1929 and a May ritual the folklorists trace to Demeter.
- 4.Campo di Giove748 residentsL'Aquila · AbruzzoAt 1,064 meters under the southwestern Maiella, the highest village in the park, named for a Roman temple to Jupiter.
- 5.Sadali837 residentsSud Sardegna · SardiniaA Barbagia di Seulo borgo at 750 meters with the only waterfall in Sardegna that drops through the inhabited centre.
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- 6.Civita d'Antino913 residentsL'Aquila · AbruzzoAt 904 meters above the Roveto valley, the ancient Marsi town that became a Danish painters' colony from 1883 until the 1915 earthquake.
- 7.Glurns937 residentsBolzano · Trentino-Alto Adige/SüdtirolThe smallest city in South Tyrol at 937 inhabitants, ringed by intact sixteenth-century walls in the Val Venosta near the Swiss border.
We write about towns like these every Sunday, one town a week, with the photo, the food, the festa. Free, from Pietrasanta.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Putignano
Province: Bari
Europe's longest-running carnival — Putignano Carnevale has run continuously since 1394, with 631 years of cartapesta papier-mâché floats, a 26,000-resident Murgia town on the Bari–Lecce plateau, and the Grotta del Trullo karst cave inside the centro.
Pistoia
Province: Pistoia
Italy's nursery capital and the medieval Tuscan rival that gave its name to the pistol — a quietly extraordinary centro storico of zebra-striped Romanesque churches, Andrea della Robbia's polychrome frieze on the Ospedale del Ceppo, and Italy's Capital of Culture 2017, all 30 minutes from Florence by train.
Tropea
Province: Vibo Valentia
Cliff town on a tufa headland over the Tyrrhenian Coast of the Gods, with a Norman monastery on a sea rock.
Caldes
Province: Trento
A scattered Val di Sole commune on the Noce, six hamlets gathered around a thirteenth-century tower-house castle that once belonged to the Thun family.
Cantiano
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
A border borgo at 374 meters under Monte Catria on the old Via Flaminia, known for the Good Friday Turba and the sour-cherry visciola harvest.