Pescara

Pescara is the Italy that isn't trying to be a postcard, a real beach city that just gets on with living well.

Abruzzo's biggest city sits where the river Pescara meets the Adriatic, a modern, sun-filled place built around one of the longest sandy beaches on this coast and a broad seafront promenade that is the heart of daily life. Rebuilt after the war, it has little of the medieval-hill-town look that draws people to the rest of Abruzzo, and that's the point. Pescara is flat, walkable, easygoing, and unpretentious, a working Adriatic city of cafés and beach clubs and evening strolls, birthplace of the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and the most connected, most convenient corner of one of Italy's most affordable regions.