Matese
Italy's newest national park — a karst wall between Campania and Molise, holding the country's highest karst lake on top, some of its deepest abysses underneath, and a Roman town at its feet.
The Matese became Italy's twenty-fifth national park on 22 April 2025, and nothing about the birth was quick: parliament decreed the park in 2017, the perimeter was then fought over for seven years, and the establishing decree was finally signed only after a court ordered the ministry to stop stalling. What the long labour delivered is a single limestone massif of nearly 88,000 protected hectares shared between Campania and Molise — the wall you see rising north of the Volturno plain, snow-capped into May, absorbing the old Campanian regional park and extending the line across the crest.
The massif is a karst machine. Rain vanishes into it through sinkholes and dolines, hollows it into some of the deepest cave systems in Italy — the abysses of Pozzo della Neve and Cul di Bove drop toward a kilometre — and returns at the great springs that feed the Volturno and Biferno rivers. What stays on top pools into Lago del Matese, at 1,012 metres the highest karst lake in the country, a reedy, bird-loud sheet under the ridge of Monte Miletto (2,050 m), where golden eagles are back and wolves never left. On the Molise flank, the Quirino gorge at Guardiaregia — a WWF oasis folded into the park — throws its waterfall through a canyon of nesting choughs.
The southern approach is Campanian hill-town country — Piedimonte Matese, Castello del Matese, San Gregorio stacked above the plain — with the small ski station of Campitello Matese above; the northern foot is Samnite. Below Sepino lies Saepinum, the most intact minor Roman town in Italy: theatre, basilica, walls and gates all standing, no fences to speak of, farm life proceeding through the forum as it has since the legions left. The old transhumance tratturi that crossed here still rule the map as grassy hundred-metre-wide roads.
What's worth knowing before you go
The park is young: expect regional-park signage, provisional boundaries and visitor infrastructure still catching up with the decree. Piedimonte Matese is the Campanian gateway (buses from Caserta and Naples); Bojano, on the Campobasso rail line, serves the Molise side, with Campitello Matese the road-head for Miletto. Caving is guided-only; the lake plateau is a gentle walking and cycling bowl even when the crest is in cloud.
The connoisseur's hour is Saepinum at golden light — sheep still funnel through the Boiano gate on their way home, which is the entire history of the Matese in one image — with the Quirino falls at Guardiaregia the spring-melt encore.