Rediscovering Italy in a Silent Town

Over the last decade or so I have visited almost every city in Italy. I've seen the Amalfi Coast, have teared up while standing in the destruction of L'Aquila, which was hit with a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in 2009. I have tromped through Roman ruins, ogled ancient frescos at Herculaneum and Pompeii, walked the crumbling streets of Palermo, been awe-struck in Turin and marveled at the opulence of Florentine art.

I have considered the notion that I have "done" Italy.

Hadley Hooper for The Wall Street Journal

But two years ago, my friend Cristina Di Benigno invited me to lunch in her village near Corvara, a tiny, little-known ruin of a town in Abruzzo, about an hour by car from the port city of Pescara.

We arrived late in the morning. It was decided that before our midday meal, which Cristina's grandmother was preparing at the family's restaurant, her father would show us around Corvara.

He explained that it is not possible to reach the town by car, as it has no roads. Corvara is situated at the highest elevation in the area, on top of what is essentially a massive boulder. On one side of this huge rock is a sheer 200-foot cliff.

The elevation and remoteness of the hamlet are fairly typical for a region that has defended itself from invasion for some 2,000 years. But Corvara is anything but typical.

We parked just below the summit of the mountain and walked into the town through a gap in the low stone wall that surrounded it. It was then that I saw that the settlement had been constructed on gradually descending levels separated by primitive stone-paved walkways.

The word "Italia," I was told, was first stamped on a coin here, sometime around 91 B.C. As we began down a central rough-hewn path between the buildings, I stopped, suddenly aware that I wasn't just looking at a centuries-old village, but an architectural time capsule. A town that remained practically untouched by modernization.

Corvara is as it has always been; a series of about 50 buildings made of irregular stone, with rustic wooden doors and roofs covered in tiles. The houses have no running water or electricity, except for the dwellings of the dozen or so hearty souls who have restored the interiors of a few structures, bringing in generators and water supplies.

What probably inspired the most reverence in me was not the architecture but the sheer emptiness of Corvara. It felt deserted, and in that stunning silence it was impossible to avoid the feeling that I was in a unique place. I left my guide and his daughter and began passing slowly from building to building, hearing only the sound of my breath and my own feet on the stones.

Years ago, at a gathering in New York, I met a prominent, bow-tie-wearing American psychic. A few minutes into our chat he stopped talking and stared at me.

"You should know that in a past life you were a first-century Italian poet," he said. "You're the only one I've ever met."

I dismissed the remark and quickly excused myself to refill my plate. A few months later, I made my first visit to the Forum in Rome. Standing there, looking across the expanse of ruins toward the Colosseum, I felt myself shiver in the 90-degree heat. Somehow, I intuited, I had been there before.

That day in Corvara I experienced something different but equally powerful: An awareness of my own humanness, a sense of privilege. I was standing on ground and walking through a place where for hundreds of years people had worked and lived out their hopes and tragedies, leaving the town untrammeled for others to admire. I felt honored.

Ninety minutes later we were back at Cristina's grandmother's restaurant looking out a window across the valley at Corvara, now bathed by the afternoon sun.

Lunch that day was 12 courses and lasted three hours, until just before sunset. Every time I whispered "basta" to grandma she just smiled and gave me something else to eat. The Italian people have managed to retain a kindness that in my experience is unequaled. Even the most cynical American writer can't deny it.

—Mr. Fante is the author of 10 books, including "Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving," published in September.

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