Four routes you can do from a campsite

1. Across Campo Imperatore

The crossing of Campo Imperatore is the best known route: half a day by car, two days on foot. You climb from Assergi and Fonte Cerreto, cross the twenty kilometres of plateau and drop down to Castel del Monte and Santo Stefano di Sessanio, two stone villages at thirteen hundred metres. The detour to Rocca Calascio is compulsory: leave the car below and walk up for twenty minutes to the castle, at 1,460 metres, the highest in the Apennines. The plateau road closes with the snow, usually from November to April.

2. The cycle path along the coast of the trabocchi

The cycle path of the trabocchi coast runs along the old Adriatic railway line, between Ortona and Vasto, at the water's edge and almost always flat. It is open in sections and the works move about, so it is worth checking beforehand which stretches are rideable. Where it is finished it is the easiest thing there is for cycling with children: no traffic, no climbs, lit tunnels and the sea ten metres away.

3. The drove roads of the transhumance

The tour of the tratturi is for those with more time. The tratturi are the tracks, up to a hundred and eleven metres wide, along which flocks went down to Puglia for centuries to spend the winter: the Tratturo Magno ran from L'Aquila to Foggia, two hundred and forty-four kilometres. Transhumance has been UNESCO heritage since 2019 and the routes are still readable across the fields, with the churches and stone enclosures that went with them.

4. The National Park, slowly

The Abruzzo National Park, on the other hand, is walked, and walked slowly. Val Fondillo and Camosciara are the two easiest ways in, both with parking and waymarked paths; to see animals you have to be there at dawn or dusk and keep quiet, which is the hard part. The bear is there but does not show itself: red deer, Apennine chamois and roe deer are seen often, and in September you can hear the stags belling from kilometres away.