All under five thousand residents, none in the standard rotation, each chosen because something specific happened there that you can still go and look at. Population figures are Istat, 1 January 2026.
419 residents. Between 1587 and 1589 an inquisitor sent from Genoa tried thirteen women of this village for witchcraft.
Piedmont78 residents. By the 1980s fewer than ten people still lived in Ostana, all of them old.
Friuli Venezia Giulia1,941 residents. The earthquakes of 6 May and 11 September 1976 flattened this walled town.
Emilia-Romagna1,047 residents. Compiano castle holds the only international Museum of Freemasonry in Italy: regalia, medals, vestments and paintings from English eighteenth and nineteenth-century symbolism, alongside Italian material.
Marche4,569 residents. The bobbin lace is not a museum exhibit here.
Lazio905 residents. In 1935 the mayor registered Calcata among the towns to be moved under a 1908 law on settlements threatened by landslides.
Abruzzo102 residents. The Medici tower came down in the earthquake of 6 April 2009.
Molise1,815 residents. Saepinum-Altilia is a complete Roman town: gate, forum, basilica, theatre.
Campania570 residents. Roscigno Vecchia is an entire village left standing and empty.
Puglia4,453 residents. Under the streets of the old centre runs a network of underground oil mills cut into the rock, in use from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.
Basilicata684 residents. About fifty narrow steps cut straight into the sandstone climb to the highest point of a Norman-Swabian fort, where a lookout watched the Basento valley.
Calabria2,306 residents. The Cattolica di Stilo is a Byzantine chapel of the ninth or tenth century built against the rock: a square plan, three apses facing east, five brick domes, and four interior columns probably taken from the ruins of Greek Kaulon.
Sicily2,807 residents. Beneath the town, in the Raffo district, there is a working rock-salt mine.
Sardinia3,803 residents. The murals begin in 1969 with the Dionysus Group, an anarchist collective led by Giancarlo Celli.
The guide takes twelve of the fourteen, one per region, and adds what each entry here leaves out: what to do with the drive, and what goes wrong.
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