Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga
The Apennine roof and its little Tibet — Corno Grande over the yellow plain of Campo Imperatore, Rocca Calascio on its crag, and Europe's southernmost glacier dying in the shade.
Two mountain systems share this park and refuse to resemble each other. The Gran Sasso is limestone theatre: Corno Grande, at 2,912 metres the roof of the Apennines, drops a nine-hundred-metre wall — the Paretone — toward the Adriatic, and cradles in its shaded combe the Calderone, Europe's southernmost glacier, now split into dying ice patches that mountaineers visit the way one visits a relative in decline. The Monti della Laga, just north, are sandstone: water runs on the surface instead of vanishing into karst, and the range answers the Gran Sasso's screes with waterfalls — the Cento Cascate strung down the Amatrice flank, frozen into blue organ pipes each winter.
Between them spreads the image everyone carries away: Campo Imperatore, twenty-seven kilometres of tawny high plain at 1,800 metres, grazed by transhumant flocks and semi-wild horses and nicknamed Little Tibet without much exaggeration. History keeps choosing this stage. The hotel on the plain held Mussolini prisoner until German gliders snatched him off it in September 1943; Rocca Calascio, the highest fortress ruin in the Apennines, watches from its crag over Santo Stefano di Sessanio, the Medici wool village revived room by scattered room as an albergo diffuso. Under it all, in galleries beside the highway tunnel, the Gran Sasso physics laboratory hunts neutrinos beneath 1,400 metres of rock — wolves above, dark matter below.
The wildlife recovery here is the central Apennines' quiet triumph: Abruzzo chamois, reintroduced from the Abruzzo park, now number in the thousands across these crags; wolves den within sight of the sheep they negotiate with; golden eagles work the plain's edges. The Laga villages carry the other recent history — the 2009 L'Aquila and 2016–17 Amatrice earthquakes struck along this seam, and around Lake Campotosto the rebuilding is still visibly unfinished.
What's worth knowing before you go
L'Aquila is the hub (frequent buses from Rome Tiburtina); the Fonte Cerreto cable car lifts you to Campo Imperatore, where the normal route on Corno Grande is a half-day scramble — exhilarating, crowded in August, and serious the moment weather builds, which on this plain it does fast. Huts: Franchetti in the Calderone combe, Duca degli Abruzzi on the ridge. The Laga side is quieter in every way; base at Campotosto.
The connoisseur's evening is arrosticini at the Fonte Vetica shepherd stalls — sheep skewers grilled by the hundred at the plain's eastern end — then Rocca Calascio for the last light, when the fortress goes amber and Campo Imperatore's horses head home along the skyline.