Apex the Ghost Town

A modern Pompeii. Apice was a small town in the province of Benevento that, following two earthquakes (1962 and 1980), was abandoned. The then first citizen, seeing the economic impossibility of getting his town back on its feet, decided to rebuild the town a few kilometers away, on the hill opposite.

It was the technicians sent by the Ministry of Public Works who put an end to the history of the small Samnite municipality. According to the technical reports reported by the municipality's website, the danger of collapse was too high and its "immediate evacuation" was ordered. Only a few managed to stay in the village, and for no more than a few years. About six thousand souls were forced to leave their homes and move to the new town, which took the name Apice nuova. After the 1980 earthquake, the village became completely deserted.

"Just as in Pompeii, a natural event stopped time in Apice. The hands of the clock stopped at 1962." Mayor Ida Antonietta Albanese remembers that August 21, which turned an ordinary village into an open-air museum. The entire area today is transennaded. Everything is left as it was. The store signs, the street lighting, the cobblestone streets, the churches, the school. There is the grocery store with the hand-drawn table; the "Beccheria" with the cold storage and display case ready to be displayed in the square; the downtown bar with the counter still intact and the bottles with liquor on the shelves; the "Glassworks" has the work table occupied by a door "in process" and around it all the tools of the time; the mortician left on the store doorway two small white coffins almost completed; the hairdresser with the perming helmets next to the chairs for customers; a small recording room of a music group.

Cars, now vintage, are still parked in the courtyards of the buildings. Some crushed by collapsing partitions. In what used to be the main street or square one proceeds in surreal silence. At the windows hang curtains, on the balconies still vases with flowers. Among the rubble one enters houses, almost all of them with a maximum of two floors. Mostly rural settings but there are also aristocratic mansions. Like that of Orlando Cantelmo, a university professor and famous surgeon in the early postwar period. The walls glow with the yellow ochre of the wall hangings. The ceilings with frescoes in the hall and bedrooms are incredibly intact.