20 Jul,2026 By Fake Travel News
Molise is Italy’s least-visited region, known for medieval hill towns, Roman ruins, and roads with more horses than traffic. It seemed like the perfect place for a quiet road trip. Jim had other priorities.
My name is Jim. It has been my whole life. But nobody’s spelled it that way since I lost the weight — a hundred and ten pounds, if you want the number, and a man who loses a hundred and ten pounds earns a new spelling whether he asks for one or not. Gym. I let it stand. It’s accurate.
Marissa planned the trip. Two weeks, a rental car, and a region I’d never heard of — Molise. She was delighted to tell me it’s the least-visited region in all of Italy, split off from Abruzzo less than fifty years ago. Never quite forgiven for it, apparently. Two provinces. A handful of country roads. More horses than tourists. She’d wanted to show it to me for a year. I want that on the record, because a lot of what follows is going to sound like it was about me, and it was — but that isn’t where it started. It started with her wanting to show me something almost nobody bothers to see.
The problem — and I raised it in the car, in what I felt was a level tone — is that a region with more horses than people does not have gyms. You can look. I looked. The nearest thing to a real facility was a converted garage outside Isernia with one treadmill and a padlock on the door. I had gone four years without missing a day. Before that, I got winded standing up too fast. And I was not handing any of that back because the scenery was good.
Marissa’s thing was the horses. Molise really does have more of them than people, and she made me pull over for every field we passed.
She’d get out, walk to the fence, stand there talking to some mare and her foal in a low voice, like they’d been expecting her. I used the stops. A field is a good place for farmer’s carries with the luggage. I’d get my grip work in while she did whatever she was doing at the fence. I thought of it as efficient. Both of us using the time. It never occurred to me to ask what she was saying to them.
Here’s what nobody tells you. A gym is a building somebody put weights inside. But the weights were always just objects. Once that lands, the whole country reorganizes itself in front of you. A stone wall is a plyo box. The steps up to a church are steps. The Fontana Fraterna in the middle of Isernia, where the local teenagers sit out at night, is a perfectly good dip station at six in the morning, when the teenagers are asleep.
Marissa kept calling the whole region romantic — the empty roads, the light on the hills, the towns stacked up where nobody would build now. I could see what she meant. But mostly I saw that a place this empty had almost nothing in it that could interrupt a set.
For the first two days she thought the workouts were funny. In the square she sat with a coffee and watched me work the lip of the fountain, and she laughed — the real one — and took a picture. I still have it. I look strong in it. She’s in the corner of the frame, out of focus, half turned toward the old stone, and I remember thinking I’d crop that part out when I had a minute.
Molise never got famous for its wine, which stops no one. There are vineyards tucked down every other country road, and the local red — Tintilia, a grape that grows just about nowhere else — comes in bottles that run around a kilo and a half full. Grip two by the neck and you’ve got a light pair of dumbbells. Load six in a bag and you’ve got a kettlebell that clinks. I built a whole circuit in the courtyard of the place we stayed and ran it before the town was up.
The man who’d sold us the wine watched me set two of his bottles back on his own wall one morning — unopened, warm from being swung around for half an hour. He said something I didn’t catch, and Marissa didn’t translate. She’d stopped translating things by then. I took it for approval. These are people who take wine seriously, and I was taking it seriously too, in my way.
The bartender had been watching all of this. He reached below the counter and produced one of the novelty limoncellos they sell out here — a bottle nearly the length of my arm. I accepted it with the gravity you’d give any new piece of equipment. Marissa laughed less at that one.
I’ll say one sincere thing, because I don’t do it often. The morning I ran up to Capracotta — one of the highest towns in the whole Apennines, the road switchbacking up into a cold the season hadn’t earned, my breath going white in front of me — that was the best I have felt as an adult. I was once a man who took the elevator one floor. And now I was running into the sky, up a mountain in a region most Italians can’t find on a map, and my heart did exactly what I’d trained it to do, and nothing in me was afraid.
Marissa drove up an hour later and found me at the top. She stood looking at the mountains going gold behind the town and said she would never forget it. I told her the climb had averaged eight percent. We stood on the same overlook, admiring the two different things we’d each come up there to admire. One of the good mornings. I’d rank it near the top of the trip.
The one thing Marissa booked for herself was the ride. Staffoli, out near Vastrogirardi — she’d been talking about it since before we landed. Two horses, a whole afternoon, the two of us out on the country roads she kept calling romantic.
I spent it doing the math. A horse carries you; your heart rate barely clears a brisk walk. As training the afternoon was close to worthless, and I told her so, gently, because I didn’t want to spoil it for her. I tried a few isometric holds in the saddle to salvage what I could. Mostly I was working out where I might fit a real session in before dark.
She didn’t say she’d remember it. That was the first time she hadn’t, and I took it as her finally settling into the pace of the place. A good sign, I decided. I banked the afternoon as a rest day and felt disciplined about the restraint.
Saepinum sits outside Sepino in Molise — a whole Roman town with almost no one in it, a theatre, a couple of temples, columns still standing in a field. There was a cat. Otherwise it was mine.
The theatre tiers turned out to be exactly the right height for step-ups, and I’d gotten a solid set going before I noticed the old man.
He wasn’t angry. That’s what I keep coming back to. I’d braced for angry, and instead he watched me the way you’d watch a dog do a thing a dog shouldn’t be able to do. The cat watched too, less impressed. I climbed down off two thousand years of theatre and tried to walk him through it — the plyometrics, the value of an uneven surface, how the stone gave back nothing and that was the whole point. He had looked after these stones, I’d guess, most of his life. He let me finish. Then he said, in English, “Why.”
No question mark on it. Just the word, set down flat. I gave him the reasoning, the philosophy of the thing, and he nodded like that settled something and went back to whatever he’d been doing. I walked back to the car feeling I’d represented a certain approach to the body well, to a man who could stand to hear it. Marissa had watched the whole thing from the gate. She didn’t say anything either. There was a lot of that toward the end — people going quiet around me — and I gathered all that quiet up and read it as respect. People go still around real conviction. I’ve noticed that about myself.
Agnone is a craft town — they’ve cast church bells there for a thousand years, hammered copper for nearly as long.
And they make a sweet: thin wafers pressed around honey and walnuts. They are not casual about it. Marissa bought two from a woman who had plainly been making them her entire life, and handed me one, and I did what I do, which is the part people understand least and I defend hardest. I taste, and I spit. You get the honey and the walnut and the whole of it across your tongue, and then, quietly, into a napkin. Nothing kept. All the signal, none of the cost.
The woman saw me. Small doorway; she was watching her wafer go into a stranger’s mouth and come back out folded in a napkin. She didn’t raise her voice. She asked, carefully, whether it was alright. I told her it was perfect, I just don’t keep the sugar. And something crossed her face that I read, standing there, as a language barrier. Marissa set money on the counter for two wafers neither of us had finished and walked out into the street. I followed her, explaining the logic of it, the clean economy of the whole method. She was already at the end of the block, not slowing down.
There’s barely a train in Molise. There’s barely a bus. Driving is the only real way in, which makes it the only real way out, and on our last morning Marissa took the car.
I want to get down what she actually said. I’ve turned it over since, and I think I finally have it right. She stood by the driver’s door with the keys and said, “You love this more than you’ll let yourself love anything.” She was looking straight at me when she said it — not at the road, not at the bags, at me — and I understood her to mean discipline. Commitment. The fact that I’d built a thing she hadn’t been willing to build. It came down, in the end, to a difference in appetite for the work.
I told her I was sorry she felt that way, and that I couldn’t be a man who stopped — not after where I’d come from, not for anyone. I was kind about it, I think. She got in and drove off. The road folded her behind a hill, the way those roads do. And the bars on my phone dropped to nothing, exactly as she’d warned me they would out here.
So I ran. Empty road, no cars, no one to work around — the least-visited region in Italy, and now there was one fewer. Best surface I’d had all trip.
I flew home lighter than I left. Slept fine. Down another two pounds by the time I landed, which I couldn’t account for, given I hadn’t changed a thing.
I kept the photo from that first morning in Isernia — the one where I look strong, the old fountain behind me, the light just coming into the square. I finally cropped it the way I’d been meaning to since the first week. Just me now, and the stone, and the light. You’d never know there was anyone else standing there.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Molise, visit the following link: Molise – Italy’s Most Mysterious Region
