Anyone looking up L’Aquila brings along a question you never ask about other art cities: can you still visit it? The earthquake of 6 April 2009 left an enormous, empty old town, and for years the photographs in circulation were the ones with the cranes in them.
The answer, in 2026, is that the city has come back, and not as a figure of speech. Figures released in April, seventeen years after the quake, put private reconstruction at 96 per cent and public reconstruction at around 60, with the population of the old town up by roughly fifteen per cent. The monuments reopened in sequence: Collemaggio in 2017, the MAXXI in 2021, the national museum in the castle in December 2025.
And then there is the reason why this is the right year: L’Aquila is Italian Capital of Culture 2026, with a programme launched on 17 January.
Careful: three constraints decide the itinerary, and you should read them before booking. The cathedral is still closed, and has been since 2009. The MAXXI opens only from Thursday to Sunday, and in September 2026 it also has extraordinary closures between the 7th and the 10th and between the 14th and the 24th. The national museum closes on Monday and for now occupies one wing of the castle out of four.
What has come back and what is still shut
How can a city be 96 per cent rebuilt and still have its cathedral barred? Because the two percentages measure different things: the 96 covers houses, which are private property, while churches, museums and public buildings fall into the other half of the ledger, the one at 60. Restoring a listed monument is slower than restoring an apartment block, and the great sacred buildings come last in the queue.
The case of the cathedral of Saints Maximus and George explains it better than any chart. Work began in February 2023, the facade has been freed of its scaffolding, and the council has stated the aim of returning it to worship by the end of 2026. That is a declared aim, not a date to put in your diary: whoever arrives finds it closed and looks at it from outside.
The photograph above dates from August 2017 and I am keeping it on purpose: it shows the state in which almost every image in circulation still shows piazza del Duomo, with the cathedral under scaffolding and three cranes in the frame. It serves as a point of comparison, not as a description of today.
Next door, in the same square, stands the opposite case. The church of Santa Maria del Suffragio, which the locals call the Anime Sante, reopened on 6 December 2018 in the presence of the President of the Republic, and is today the first restored building you meet on the way into the centre.
In the photograph above, taken in August 2024, you can see the city’s double nature clearly: the restored church, the newly paved and empty square, and a crane still standing on the right. This is the landscape you will find, and it is neither a ruin nor a postcard.
Day one, morning: Collemaggio and the first jubilee in history
You start outside the walls rather than in the centre, for a precise historical reason. The basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio is the monument L’Aquila carries on its moral coat of arms. Pietro da Morrone founded it in 1287, and here he was crowned pope on 29 August 1294 as Celestine V. From this church later came the bull that established the Perdonanza, the first jubilee in the history of the Church, six years before Boniface VIII’s of 1300.
The facade is the thing that will stay with you: a flat rectangle faced with pink and white blocks laid out like a chessboard, three rose windows and three portals. Inside, the restoration after 2009 returned the church to its medieval form, with octagonal piers, exposed timber trusses and a chequered floor.
The visit takes forty minutes, admission is free and the basilica opens every day. The full account, with the Holy Door, the mausoleum of Celestine V and the legends worth taking apart, is in the article on the basilica of Collemaggio and the Perdonanza.
Day one, afternoon: the castle and the museum that came home
From the park at Collemaggio you cross the centre and reach the other end of town, where an enormous square of stone sits inside a dry moat. This is the Spanish fort, built between 1534 and 1567 on the orders of the viceroy of Naples, and its history contains a twist that on its own justifies the climb: the city paid for it itself, as punishment for a revolt.
The 2026 news, though, is inside. The MuNDA, the national museum of Abruzzo, returned to the castle on 20 December 2025, after sixteen years of exile in a former slaughterhouse, and the following June it received a guest nobody expected in Abruzzo: the Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina, bought by the Italian state at auction.
Allow an hour and a half for the museum and the walk round the outside of the moat, which is free and can be done on foot all the way round. The details, from the mammoth to the Beffi Triptych, are in the article on the Spanish fort and the MuNDA.
Day two, morning: San Bernardino and its staircase
The basilica of San Bernardino announces itself with a very wide staircase rising between cedars, and at the top it has the most ambitious facade in the city: three superimposed orders of paired columns, designed by Cola dell’Amatrice and finished in 1542.
Inside are two sculptures that on their own explain why people speak of a local Renaissance in L’Aquila, and the same artist made both, Silvestro dell’Aquila: the saint’s mausoleum and the funerary monument of Maria Pereyra Camponeschi, where the daughter, a small child, lies beneath her mother’s sarcophagus. There is also a Resurrection in glazed terracotta by Andrea della Robbia, Florentine in make and brought here on commission.
Free admission, open from 7:00 to 19:00 every day: it is the easiest monument to fit in. Everything else is in the article on the basilica of San Bernardino.
Day two: the 99 spouts, which are not a fountain
Going down towards Borgo Rivera, in the lower part of town, you reach a courtyard closed off by two walls faced with the same chequerwork as Collemaggio. Ninety-nine jets of water come out of those walls, ninety-three from stone masks, all of them different, and six from plain spouts.
What makes this place different from any other monumental fountain? The fact that nobody knows for certain where the water comes from. The spring was kept secret to avoid arguments over patronage, and secret it has remained. The fountain dates from 1272 and was one of the first monuments in L’Aquila to be made whole again after the quake, in December 2010, with a restoration paid for by the FAI. The full account is in the article on the fountain of the 99 spouts.
If you have an extra afternoon: the MAXXI at Palazzo Ardinghelli
The MAXXI L’Aquila is the second site of the national museum of twenty-first-century arts, and it occupies a baroque palace in piazza Santa Maria Paganica that in 2009 was a ruin propped up with steel beams. The restoration, funded by the Russian Federation with 7.2 million euros, reopened it to the public on 30 May 2021.
It is worth a visit for the building alone. Careful: the opening hours are the real obstacle. It opens from Thursday to Sunday, 11:00-19:00, and in September 2026 it has extraordinary closures between the 7th and the 10th and between the 14th and the 24th, in the changeover between two exhibitions. How it works and what is inside are in the article on the MAXXI at Palazzo Ardinghelli.
How to order the itinerary: the calendar decides
In L’Aquila the order of your visits is dictated not by geography, which is convenient because you can walk across the centre in twenty minutes, but by the opening calendar. Keep it in this form:
On Monday the castle museum is closed and so is the MAXXI: you are left with Collemaggio, San Bernardino, the 99 spouts and the churches, which makes for a fine day with no museums in it. On Tuesday and Wednesday the castle opens and the MAXXI stays shut. From Thursday to Sunday everything is open, and these are the only days on which two full days genuinely work.
The practical advice, if you can choose: arrive on Thursday and leave on Saturday. On the first Sunday of the month, meanwhile, the national museum is free, so it is worth working that into the plan.
Italian Capital of Culture 2026: what changes for visitors
The title of Italian Capital of Culture was awarded to L’Aquila under the slogan «Un territorio, mille capitali», one territory, a thousand capitals, and the programme announces more than three hundred events across three hundred days, spread over art, music, theatre, cinema and dance. The calendar opened with a ceremony on 17 January 2026.
For a visitor the two entries that really count are these. The first is «Palazzi Aperti», which one Sunday a month until the end of 2026 opens historic houses that are normally shut: it is the only chance to get inside buildings you otherwise look at from the street. The second is that the MAXXI’s two big exhibitions fall in this year, and the autumn one opens on 26 September 2026 with «Fabio Mauri. Gli anni dell’Aquila», curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini.
The programme also announces the reopening of the Teatro Comunale, expected in October 2026. As with the cathedral, that is a forecast: check before you count on it.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the official sites of the MuNDA, the MAXXI L’Aquila and the sanctuary of Collemaggio, and by cross-checking the local press on the state of the building sites. Prices, hours and building sites change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. There is no single city pass. The national museum in the castle costs 12 euros full price and 2 reduced, with free entry under 18 and on the first Sunday of the month. The MAXXI costs 10 euros full price and 5 reduced. Collemaggio, San Bernardino, Santa Maria del Suffragio and the 99 spouts are free.
Opening hours. The castle museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 19:00, with last admission at 18:00, and closes on Monday. The MAXXI opens Thursday to Sunday from 11:00 to 19:00. Collemaggio opens every day from 9:00 to 18:00 from November to April and from 9:00 to 19:00 from May to October. San Bernardino opens every day from 7:00 to 19:00.
Getting there. The bus is the right choice: TUA services leave from the Tiburtina coach station in Rome and take about an hour and forty minutes. The train is not competitive, because there is no direct link from Rome and the journey via Terni takes almost four hours with changes. By car you arrive on the A24 and park outside the old town, which is largely pedestrianised.
How long it takes. Two full days cover the six places in this guide at a comfortable pace. A single day is enough for Collemaggio, the castle with its museum and the 99 spouts, and in that case the MAXXI stays out.
Where to eat, in two words. Arrosticini and pasta alla chitarra are the two dishes you will find on every menu in the centre; nougat and sugared almonds belong to Sulmona, an hour away, and the guide to Sulmona explains why that town lives on sugar.
Two days, in short
L’Aquila is not visited the way Florence is, where the monuments stand next to one another and the difficulty is the crowd. Here the monuments are few, large and far apart; there is no crowd, and the difficulty is the calendar.
The thread that holds them together, though, is stronger than in many undamaged cities: every building in this guide has been closed, propped up and reopened in the past seventeen years, and each one carries the date of its own reopening. Seen this way, L’Aquila is the one place in Italy where restoration is not a footnote but the subject.
Photographs: the facade of Collemaggio by Kewerner and Santa Maria del Suffragio by Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0), piazza del Duomo in 2017 by Ra Boe and the bastion of the Spanish fort by Michał Winiarski (CC BY-SA 3.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
