Maiella

Abruzzo calls the Maiella the mother mountain, and the affection is structural: this is not a ridge but a bulk, a whale-backed massif whose summit plateau runs for twenty kilometres above 2,500 metres, culminating in Monte Amaro at 2,793 — the Apennines' second summit. Up there the landscape is periglacial stone desert, home to the Apennine edelweiss and to chamois reintroduced onto ledges they had been shot off a century before; below, the massif's flanks are sawn by some of Italy's deepest canyons, the Orfento's mossy slot and the great gorge that opens at Fara San Martino. The park dates from 1995 — spelled Majella by its own authority until recently — and became a UNESCO Geopark in 2021.

Its human story is vertical too, and mostly hermits. The limestone bands are strung with rock-cut hermitages: Santo Spirito a Majella wedged into its cliff, San Bartolomeo in Legio under its overhang, San Giovanni all'Orfento reachable only by shuffling along a carved ledge. Their most famous tenant was Pietro da Morrone, the hermit dragged off this mountain in 1294 to become Pope Celestine V — history's great refuser, back within months. Six centuries later the mountain hid different fugitives: escaped Allied POWs and the partisans of the Brigata Maiella crossed these passes through the winter of 1943–44, and the Freedom Trail from Sulmona over the massif to Casoli is re-walked every year in their memory.

Wolves live here at some of the highest densities in Italy, bears wander in from the Abruzzo park's network, and otters have crept back up the Orta's tributaries. The gastronomy is geology: Fara San Martino's spring, cold out of the gorge, made the town a pasta capital — the factories' shops sell the mountain's water in dried form — while Caramanico Terme has bottled its sulphur springs into a spa economy since the eighteenth century. On the eastern shoulder, the road to the Blockhaus (named for a nineteenth-century anti-brigand fort) is one of the Giro d'Italia's cruellest climbs, a cathedral of cycling grief with a view.

What's worth knowing before you go

Sulmona is the rail approach; Caramanico Terme, Fara San Martino, Pescocostanzo and Pacentro make the best bases, each on a different flank. Monte Amaro is a long, waterless day from any side (the Rifugio Pomilio/Blockhaus ridge line is the gentlest); afternoon storms build fast in July. The Orfento valley walks from Caramanico are the easy way into the park's character — permits are free at the visitor centre.

The connoisseur's morning is San Bartolomeo in Legio just after dawn, sharing the ledge with nobody, then a soak at Caramanico — and on a summer Sunday, coffee at the Blockhaus watching the club cyclists arrive one by one, each with the same expression.