Italy's peeling, sun-bleached south is the country at its most ancient, soulful and sensual. Down here, the ruins are older, the lunches longer, and the landscapes wilder and more intense.
Campania is the Italy of your wildest dreams: a rich, intense, hypnotic ragù of Arabesque street life, decadent palaces and pastel-hued villages. In Molise, mountains and hills, rather than people, crowd the interior, while flatter plains guard a short 35km stretch of Adriatic coast. Puglia can surely now take its place in the first rank of Italy's famous regions. Clearly, everything the Italophile craves is there in abundance. Much of Basilicata is an otherworldly landscape of mountain ranges, trackless forests and villages that seem to sprout organically from the granite. If a Vespa-riding, siesta-loving, unapologetically chaotic Italy still exists, it's in Calabria.
These are the top experiences and sights in Campania, Molise, Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria according to Lonely Planet.
