Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise
Italy's great survivor — the beech-forest Apennines of the upper Sangro, where the Marsican bear, the wolf and the Abruzzo chamois rode out the twentieth century.
The park opened in September 1922 as a private initiative — a conservation society led by the Abruzzese deputy Erminio Sipari leased the old royal hunting grounds of the upper Sangro valley — and the state made it official by royal decree the following January, a few weeks after Gran Paradiso. The point was the animals. Three large mammals had their last or best refuge in these mountains: the Marsican brown bear, a subspecies found nowhere else on earth; the Apennine wolf, which survived here when it had been shot out of the rest of western Europe; and the Abruzzo chamois, down to a few dozen animals on the Camosciara crags. A century on, the park — renamed in 2001 to acknowledge the corners of Lazio and Molise it spills into — still carries all three: fifty-odd bears, wolves that have since recolonised half of Italy from this nucleus, and thousands of chamois seeded across the central Apennines.
What holds them is beech. The high Sangro country is one continuous canopy folded over ridge after ridge, and in Val Cervara above Villavallelonga it grows the oldest beech forest in Europe — trees pushing six centuries, inscribed by UNESCO among the continent's ancient beech woods. Under and around the forest sit the villages that have always lived with the park rather than beside it: Pescasseroli, the park's seat and Benedetto Croce's birthplace; Opi on its saddle above the Camosciara; Civitella Alfedena, a stone knot of alleys with the wolf museum and the path up Val di Rose; Barrea above its blue-green lake.
Walking here is village-to-village rather than hut-to-hut: up Val Fondillo or Val di Rose in the morning, chamois on the screes by ten, back down to a different piazza by evening. In high summer the most sensitive valleys switch to numbered daily access — a rationing the park invented decades before "overtourism" had a name.
What's worth knowing before you go
Pescasseroli is the base, reached by bus from Avezzano (rail from Rome) or from Castel di Sangro on the Sulmona line. Val di Rose and a few other chamois valleys require the summer permit-and-quota system — book at the Civitella Alfedena office the day before. Snow lingers on the 2,000-metre crests into June; September and October, when the beech turns and the bears gorge on buckthorn, are the finest weeks.
The connoisseur's hour is dusk at the Gioia Vecchio overlook on the park's western rim, scanning the clearings with binoculars: this is the most reliable free bear-watching in western Europe, and the etiquette — engine off, voices down, two hundred metres minimum — is taken seriously.