Foreste Casentinesi
Two monastic forests grown ancient on the Tuscan-Romagnol crest — Camaldoli's firs, La Verna's cliff of St Francis, and Sasso Fratino, uncut since before anyone can say.
On the crest between the infant Arno and the Romagna valleys stands the largest and oldest block of forest in peninsular Italy, and it survived because of monks. At Camaldoli, founded by St Romuald around 1012, the hermits wrote silviculture into their rule — the Camaldolese Forest Code governed planting and felling for eight centuries, and their cathedral-nave stands of silver fir supplied beams and ship timber floated down the Arno to Florence and Pisa. Across the ridge at La Verna, the monastery clamped to a cliff where Francis of Assisi received the stigmata in 1224 keeps its own holy wood, and Della Robbia blues inside. The national park, created in 1993, wrapped both monasteries' forests and everything between.
Its inner sanctum is Sasso Fratino: a beech-and-fir slope so steep it was never logged, made Italy's first integral nature reserve in 1959 and listed by UNESCO among Europe's ancient beech forests in 2017. Nobody enters without a research permit; five-century trees fall and rot where they stood, which is precisely the exhibit. Monte Falterona anchors the Tuscan side, with the Arno rising at Capo d'Arno just below the summit — Dante measured the river's whole arc from here — and the Lago degli Idoli nearby, where nineteenth-century diggers pulled thousands of Etruscan votive bronzes out of a spring-fed pool.
The forest carries the fullest large-mammal set in the northern Apennines: wolves that never left, and red, roe and fallow deer, mouflon and boar in such numbers that the September rut is the park's loudest event — the authority runs guided "bramito" evenings to hear the stags bellow in the dark. Autumn is altogether the season here: chestnuts and porcini in the village fairs, and a leaf-turn that draws photographers the way the coast draws swimmers.
What's worth knowing before you go
From the Tuscan side, the Casentino branch railway from Arezzo reaches Bibbiena and Poppi (whose castle is worth the stop), with buses up to Badia Prataglia; from Romagna, Santa Sofia is the gateway, by bus from Forlì. Camaldoli and La Verna welcome visitors daily; Sasso Fratino is closed, full stop — the viewpoint is the ridge trail above. Paths are gentle by Apennine standards, waymarked, and walkable April through November.
The connoisseur's hour is vespers at the Eremo di Camaldoli — twenty hermit cells behind a baroque church at 1,100 metres — followed by the fir avenue at dusk; on the way out, the monastery's pharmacy, trading since 1046, sells the balsams and liqueurs that are the forest in a bottle.