The Trabocchi Coast:
Where Wooden Giants Watch Over the Sea

The Coast That Time Built Differently

There are coastlines built for spectacle. And then there is the Costa dei Trabocchi. Stretching 42 kilometres between Ortona and Vasto along Abruzzo's Adriatic shore, this is a place where the land doesn't simply end at the water's edge but it reaches out into the sea.

The trabocchi are ancient wooden fishing machines: vast, skeletal structures of Aleppo pine whose long arms — called antenne — once held great nets suspended over the deep. Today they stand as a kind of living archaeology. Some are still fished. Many have become seafood restaurants where a table hangs quite literally over the water.

But the trabocchi are only one layer of this coast. Below them, pebbled coves and sandy crescents alternate with pine-topped cliffs. The scent of Mediterranean scrub drifts down from the hills. The sea, depending on the hour, shifts from jade to cobalt to a turquoise that makes you stop mid-step.

42 KM

 The Via Verde at the Right Speed

The old Adriatic railway line no longer carries trains. Instead, it carries people who have chosen to slow down. The Via Verde dei Trabocchi follows the former track for 42 kilometres, running between tunnels carved into cliffs and viewpoints that open without warning onto vast, open sea. On foot or by bicycle — ideally an e-bike, to savour rather than suffer the distance — it is one of the most quietly extraordinary journeys in all of Italy.

You pass through nine coastal villages, each with its own character: the whitewashed terraces of San Vito Chietino, the fishing harbour of Fossacesia Marina, the wild reserve around Punta Aderci near Vasto where the only sound is wind over rock. You stop when you want. You sit on a beach with no name. You eat fried fish from a paper cone outside a bar that has been there since your grandparents were young. The Via Verde has no real itinerary — only a direction, and the sea beside you.

Lunch or Dinner Suspended Above the Adriatic

Booking a table at a trabocco restaurant means walking out along a narrow wooden walkway, feeling the boards flex gently underfoot, and sitting down above open water with nothing between you and the horizon. The menu is whatever came up in the nets that morning: spaghetti alle vongole made with clams still gritty from the sand, grilled seppia crisped in olive oil, perhaps a fritto misto that arrives in a cloud of steam.

This is not fine dining. It is something older and more honest: a meal tied directly to the place it came from, eaten in the place it was caught.

The trabocchi remind you that food is not a product. It is a relationship between people and the land, and in this case, the sea beneath their feet.

Authentic

Unique

Slow

Local

MAKE IT YOURS

A Coast Still Off the Map

The Costa dei Trabocchi is, by Italian coastal standards, quietly unknown. The big summer crowds go to Puglia, to the Amalfi Coast, to Sardinia. Here, even in July, you can find a cove that feels like your own discovery. Rocca San Giovanni watches from the hills above. The Abbey of San Giovanni in Venere catches the afternoon light from its cliff above Fossacesia.

This is the coast borGO is drawn to: not despite its quietness, but because of it. We work with local people who live here, fish here, cook here — people who know which trabocco has the best brodetto, which cove the tourists miss, which trail through the macchia brings you out at exactly the right moment above the sea. We do not organise tours. We open doors.

What you can do on the Trabocchi Coast

Every experience we build here is created in collaboration with the people who actually live on this coast fishermen, cooks, cyclists, custodians of trabocchi that have never appeared on a tourist leaflet.