The high plain of Campo Imperatore sits at about 5,800 feet and runs roughly eleven miles end to end. It is an hour and forty minutes from Fiumicino by highway and mountain road, and on a Tuesday in October you can stand in the middle of it and count four cars. That combination, close to Rome and still empty, is why we book a short notice trip to Abruzzo more often than any other file on this desk.
The arithmetic is simple. Abruzzo takes about two percent of Italy's foreign visitors and holds three national parks. There is no coach traffic. There is no cruise port. Nothing in the region is timed to a release date except the summer itself, so the calendar that governs everywhere else does not govern here, and a house that would need eleven months on the Amalfi coast needs nineteen days in Calascio.
What eats the notice is the car, and the car is the whole file. Six nights, two adults, a stone house with a kitchen, and a vehicle you have from the airport curb to the airport curb.
- Notice
- A few weeks out, you take what is still open
- How far ahead
- Three to five weeks is the working window, counted in weeks rather than months, September through July.
- What has to be reserved first
- The single component that goes first is the hire car, not the house. Cars at Fiumicino and Ciampino are released to the rental fleets in blocks and the automatic transmission subset is small, roughly one car in seven across the Rome desks; inside twenty one days the automatics are usually gone and the small manual hatchbacks go with them by day ten in July. Houses on the Campo Imperatore side hold much longer, because owners of the two and three bedroom stone houses in Santo Stefano di Sessanio, Castel del Monte and Calascio take late bookings by phone all year and the cancellation returns land Monday and Tuesday mornings. What is left if you come late is a larger vehicle at roughly twice the daily rate, or a manual, or a house one valley over in the Subequana with a longer drive to the plain. The fallback we use most often is a station car from L'Aquila rather than Rome, picked up off the bus from Tiburtina, which trades ninety minutes of driving for a fleet nobody has picked over.
- Nights
- 6
- From
- $2,140 per person
- Shape of it
- hire car, a high plain and hill towns
- What is in the figure
- Six nights in a two or three bedroom self catering stone house in the Gran Sasso foothills, booked in your name with the owner; a compact hire car for six days with unlimited mileage collected at a Rome airport or in L'Aquila; the highway toll transponder fitted; a written driving sheet with the three mountain roads and their gradients; a printed list of the alimentari, butchers and bakeries in your village and their closing days; one written itinerary revision after you arrive at the file.
- What is not
- Flights to and from Rome, and any onward domestic connection; the fuel deposit and the fuel itself, roughly $70 to $95 for the week at current diesel prices; food, wine and every restaurant meal; the tourist tax collected in person by the owner, usually $1.60 to $3.20 per adult per night; parking inside the Aquila ring, which is metered and cash only in places; entry to the fortress at Rocca Calascio and to any museum; the mountain refuge lunches on the plain; guides of any kind, and the fee for the wildlife walking outfits inside the national park, which you book directly; the roof box or the second driver line on the rental contract; anything you add to the car at the counter.
- Who it does not suit
- Do not book this for August. Between roughly July 28 and August 24 the houses go to Italian families for the whole month, the rental fleets clear out of Rome, and prices double when anything is left at all. Do not reserve this if you will not drive a manual and cannot pay the automatic premium, because the roads to Campo Imperatore have no bus. Do not reserve this if you want to walk to dinner: villages here are three to nine miles apart and several have one place to eat that closes two days a week. Do not reserve this if you need firm plans, because a short notice file changes shape twice before it settles.
Ground that changes 4,000 feet in forty minutes
You land at sea level and you sleep at 4,200 feet. The road up from the Aquila basin climbs through Assergi and into the tunnel, or over the older pass road if the tunnel is closed for work, and comes out on a plain that looks like nothing else in Italy. Short grass, no cover, sheep in five hundreds, and the wall of the Gran Sasso on the north side rising to 9,554 feet at Corno Grande. The plain is drained by nothing. Snow lies on it into May in a heavy year and the road across is gated when it does.
The villages sit below, on spurs at 3,000 to 4,600 feet. Santo Stefano di Sessanio is stone on stone, mostly restored after 2009. Castel del Monte is steeper, a stack of alleys with stairs instead of streets, and parking is at the bottom, so the walk to your door with a week of groceries is real. Rocca Calascio is a ruin on a knife of rock at 4,790 feet with a marked path from the parking area, about half a mile with 260 feet of climb, and it is where everyone photographs from.
The bears matter as a fact, not a thrill. The Marsican brown bear numbers somewhere between fifty and sixty animals, most of them in the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise park south of here, and the park publishes rules for food storage and driving speeds after dark. You will most likely see none. You will see wolves' tracks and chamois on the ridges above Campo Imperatore, which were reintroduced from 1992 and now run to several hundred.
The month the whole thing shuts, and the weeks that work
Nothing here sells out on a date. It sells out in a block. Italian domestic holidays fill the region from the last days of July, peak hard around August 15, and let go in the final week of the month. Outside that, the stone house market is a phone call. Owners rarely list a full year and often hold two or three weeks unpublished for people they know, which is why an inquiry three weeks out sometimes gets a better house than one made in February.
The car runs opposite. Rental fleets in Rome are sized for the summer and the automatic share stays thin year round. Add a Christmas or Easter week and even the manuals thin out inside ten days.
- Twenty one days out, September to June
- Everything ordinary is available: house, compact manual, and usually an automatic if we ask that day
- Fourteen days out, September to June
- Houses still open. Automatics at Rome are a coin toss and the price steps up around forty percent
- Ten days out, July or a holiday week
- Manual compacts are going. We move the pickup to L'Aquila or take a larger class
- Any date inside July 28 to August 24
- Houses gone to month long domestic lets, fleets cleared, and we say so rather than book you something worse
- Late November into March
- Wide open on houses, but the Campo Imperatore road can be gated and the file is written around that
From your first message to the confirmed file
A short notice file is not a slower file rushed. It is a different order of operations: we confirm the vehicle before we confirm anything else, because the vehicle is the constraint and the house is not. A message reaches us and is reaches a person that working day. a quoted figure arrives two to four working days after, and on a short notice file we normally hold a vehicle class while we write it.
- Day oneYou tell us the dates and whether anyone in the party drives a manual. We check the Rome and L'Aquila fleets the same working day and tell you which of the two the file should use
- Days two to fourWe call the owners directly in Santo Stefano, Castel del Monte, Calascio and the Subequana valley, and come back with two or three real houses with real photographs, not a search page
- Day fiveThe written figure goes to you: house, car, tolls, driving sheet, and the closing days of the shops in whichever village you chose
- On confirmationThe house goes into your name with the owner, the car contract is issued to the named driver, and we send the pass road and tunnel status for your week
Tell us the dates first
Give us your dates and whether a manual gearbox is in the party, and we will tell you inside the same working day whether the week is workable and where the car should come from. If the answer is August, we will tell you that too.