Intriguing and eerie at the same time, there are few more spectacular places to be found in Italy than its ghost towns of the deep south. The towns lay seemingly forgotten amid the hilly Italian landscape and although filled with signs of life, there is not a single inhabitant to be found. Abandoned a few decades ago after being hit by a series of earthquakes, visiting these ghost towns offer one of Italy’s most fascinating experiences.
​Paths overgrown with blooming dandelions, a herd of goats grazing alongside a row of dilapidated houses and a sad looking donkey amid a forgotten orange orchard that will never be cultivated again… Once these were places of lively commerce, juicy town gossip and passionate late night quarrels as you can only find them in Italy. Nowadays nothing remains but memories of what once has been. The fountain where so many couples exchanged their first kiss, the parental home which housed many a warm childhood memory and the church walls against which intense prayers reverberated have all been wiped away by a single stroke of mother nature’s hand.

The same hand that takes life however also grants it. Decades after the towns of Craco, Poggioreale and Maratea have been destroyed by earthquakes, life slowly starts blooming up once more. The collapsed church houses a family of sparrows, all sorts of greenery pours out of the abandoned windows and trees put their roots into balconies on which no man will ever sit again... Now the memory of the catastrophes is slowly fading away, it has become possible to see the beauty of the towns’ surrender to nature’s embrace. Left to the eternal cycle of nature‘s forces, life springs up where previously only mourners were found. If anything, it shows that however destructive nature‘s forces might be, there never exists such a thing as an end. There are only new beginnings...