Written in English from Rome and Los Angeles

The Italy nobody checked

Small towns, archives and verified oddities, for people who have read the same eight Italian destinations in every guide and want to know what else there is. Every claim on this site carries its source, and every page says when it was last checked.

Field notes

Things about Italy that are true, sourced, and not in the brochures.

Field note

Borders that make no sense

Six places where the map of Italy stopped agreeing with itself

Field note

The villages the state tried to move

What happens when a government orders a town to stop existing

Field note

What Vesuvius kept

The eruption of 79 is still producing new information, almost every month

Field note

Found by accident

A plough, a fishing net, a road widening, a wall that needed underpinning

Field note

The ground is moving

Volcanoes, glaciers and a caldera with half a million people living inside it

Field note

The rules Italians live with

Dress codes, entry fees, tourist taxes and a bridge waiting on an accounting court

Field note

Things that never stopped

A quarry working since 1387, a forest owned collectively since 1111, a mountain road cut by hand in nine months

Towns

Fourteen villages in fourteen regions, all under five thousand people, none of them on a coach route. Each entry ends with the honest part: where the beds run out, which festival was cancelled, where the road closes.

Liguria

Triora

419 residents. Between 1587 and 1589 an inquisitor sent from Genoa tried thirteen women of this village for witchcraft.

Piedmont

Ostana

78 residents. By the 1980s fewer than ten people still lived in Ostana, all of them old.

Friuli Venezia Giulia

Venzone

1,941 residents. The earthquakes of 6 May and 11 September 1976 flattened this walled town.

Emilia-Romagna

Compiano

1,047 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.

Marche

Offida

4,569 residents. The bobbin lace is not a museum exhibit here.

Lazio

Calcata

905 residents. In 1935 the mayor registered Calcata among the towns to be moved under a 1908 law on settlements threatened by landslides.

All fourteen towns

Roots

Italian civil registration does not start on the same date across the country, and that single fact decides how far back an American family can go. What the records are, where they live, what is free online, and what the 2025 law actually changed.

Start here

Twelve Towns, free

Twelve Italian villages in twelve different regions, none of them on a coach route. What happened in each one, how you actually get there, and what nobody selling you a trip will tell you. Fifteen pages, sent straight away.

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