Tuesday 14th October 2025 – Pettorano Sul Gizio, Italy

Over breakfast I chatted with Cathy and Phil, another British couple. They are Interrailing with their bikes and I asked them how they were getting on. We have friends in the village that use rail to travel to locations where they can start on a long-distance such as the Rhine from source to the sea. Trying to organise the trains and book the bikes is always a big task for them and it appears that it was quite difficult for Cathy and Phil. However their biggest problem was with the Italy – Greece ferry tickets. The office staff at the port are brusque and unhelpful and that made the situation worse. Fortunately, they had time to sort it out and got onto the ferry.
We arrived on-time and had decided to avoid the obvious route up the east coast and plotted a route up the centre of Italy. We started on busy roads (SS16 & SS17) before getting on to quieter roads with beautiful mountain scenery and hilltop towns. The route was more mountainous than we were expecting and we reached a pass near Roccaraso at about 1,250 metres. At the higher altitudes, Autumn was well in evidence with many brightly coloured trees. It was at that pass that we saw a sign off to a ski resort. I had no idea that there were ski resorts so far south in Italy but the roads on much of the journey had signs saying that winter tyres or snow chains were mandatory between 15^th November and 15^th April.
We arrived at our destination of Pettorano Sul Gizio after descending 400 metres from the pass. We had been passing many signs warning us of bears and we were now in the Nature Reserve of Monte Genzana. Needless to say that we hadn’t seen any bears.
I had picked our overnight stop from Park4Night (#515044) as it was next to an Archaeological Park and I thought that the village might be interesting. When we arrived, we found a fascinating hilltop village and the car park next to a mountain stream and is below the cliff on which the village sits. It was quite late so we decided to investigate tomorrow and have dinner in the van. We went to sleep with the sound of the water rushing down a few metres away.
Photos: Arriving at Bari; Our wild camping pitch at Pettorano Sul Gizio; A cockerel was there to greet us – he seemed to like the car park and gave a strangled cock-a-doodle-doo at dawn the next day.