As usual, the problem is not finding things to see and do, but choosing among the too-many options.
Our interests (his, mine, & ours) are local and hyper-local food and wine, farmers’ markets, sagre, medieval church art and architecture, wildflowers, seeing the countryside, walking around in towns, and short nature hikes.
We’ll have a car and we often purposely take the smallest and twistiest roads on the map. We have gone beyond “slow travel” and are now well into “lazy travel.” Long lunches and not doing much in the afternoons. We like to stay a while in one place and do day trips.
Seems like Sulmona should be one home base, Atri another, but in addition we are now (after Sicily) OK with staying just a night or two in a few places (what we call “The Jean Way”). Maybe Teramo, Lanciano, and Bominaco?
We do like castles, Roman ruins, museums, cheese factories, wineries, but (as we decided during our latest Sicily trip) these are all things we have seen a lot of already and can skip when necessary. Similarly, at this point in our visits to Italy, we have visited an awful lot of beautiful little towns and we now need for a town to have some additional reason to see it, such as a restaurant or bakery or church or museum we want to go to.
Not interested in shopping, fancy restaurants, or luxury accommodations. Don’t need beaches or looking at much coastal scenery, but we do like to see wooden fishing boats and guys selling the day’s catch. My husband speaks Italian quite well and has enjoyed activities like helping with a grape harvest, seeing olive oil being pressed, cooking and eating meals with a cesarina and her family, and going on a truffle hunt. I’m the museums/churches/”happy just looking at stuff” one. I should add that, so soon after our Sicily trip, we've seen all the Baroque we want to see for a while....
In the area, we’d like to do something related to the Transumanza (what?), see the Trabocchi Coast and eat a meal in a fishing hut, see L’Aquila’s fountain of the 99 spouts, and visit Agnone’s 1000-year-old bell foundry (near by in Molise).
We'll be driving to Abruzzo after 10 days in Puglia.
Here are some places that look interesting to us (mostly gathered from Nelly’s many helpful posts) — are any similar enough that we could cut a few to make our two weeks work out?
Abbazia di San Clemente a Casauria — nice Romanesque church
Campo Imperatore — alpine meadow
Caramanico Terme — gorge walk
Chieti — National Archeological Museum of Abruzzo
Citta Sant’Angelo ?
Civitella del Tronto ?
Guardiagrele ?
L'Aquila — National Museum of Abruzzo
Loreto Aprutino — castle, Italy’s narrowest lane, some of Italy’s best wine & olive oil
Santa Maria ad Cryptas in Fossa
Santo Stefano di Sessanio ?
Scanno ?
Thanks for any advice — we are excited to explore a new region!
Nancy