Appennino Tosco-Emiliano
The watershed crest between two Italies — glacial cirques and wolf ridgelines from the Cisa to the Forbici passes, with Dante's stone prow of Bismantova standing offshore.
This is the park of the divide. The Tuscan-Emilian Apennine is where Italy's two climates meet: Mediterranean air from the Ligurian Sea breaks against the crest, Po-plain fog laps the other side, and the ridgeline walker crosses the boundary a dozen times a day. The national park, designated in 2001 and the core of a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 2015, strings together the highest section of that divide — Alpe di Succiso, Monte Cusna at 2,121 metres, Monte Prado just across the line as Tuscany's highest summit — with the glacial furniture the last ice age left on the north side: cirques, moraines and tarn lakes like Lago Santo above Lagdei and Lago Calamone under Monte Ventasso.
The park's emblem stands apart from the crest. Pietra di Bismantova is a sandstone mesa rising sheer out of the Reggio hills, visible from half of Emilia — strange enough that Dante used its climb in the Purgatorio as his measure of steepness, and beloved enough of climbers that its yellow walls hold routes from the 1920s onward. Below the mountains runs the old vertical economy: chestnut woods, summer pastures, and the stone villages of the Lunigiana and Garfagnana valleys on the Tuscan side. The crest itself carries harder history — the Gothic Line ran along these passes in 1944, and the fortification scraps and partisan memorials are part of any long ridge walk.
The animal of the park is the wolf. When the Apennine population was down to its last hundreds, these ridges were one of its refuges; the recolonisation of the Alps ran through here, and the park now hosts some of the best-studied packs in Italy. Golden eagles patrol the cirque headwalls, mouflon graze the Orecchiella side, and the high blueberry moors — brughiere that turn crimson in September — are a landscape found almost nowhere else this far south.
What's worth knowing before you go
Castelnovo ne' Monti, under Bismantova, is the Emilian base, an hour by bus from Reggio Emilia; the park seat is Sassalbo, above Fivizzano, reached from Aulla on the Parma–La Spezia rail line. The crest paths (the GEA long-distance route runs the whole divide) are snow-free roughly June to October; Cusna and Prado are long but unglamorous walks from Febbio or the Orecchiella. Refuges exist but are sparse — plan around villages.
The connoisseur's morning is a caseificio visit around Castelnovo at eight, when the day's parmigiano di montagna wheels come out of the whey, followed by the Bismantova circuit before the tour buses — the summit plateau at dawn, with the whole crest lined up to the south, is the park in one view.