Sila
Calabria's forested roof — a granite plateau of giant pines and hydro lakes where the wolf rode out its darkest century, with a steam train through the woods.
The Sila upends every expectation of Calabria. Instead of dry coasts and vertical villages, the region's heart is a granite plateau at 1,300–1,700 metres — rolling, glacial-looking, snow-buried in winter — carrying one of Italy's great forests: the silva that named it. The Romans logged it for fleets, the Bourbons for shipyards, and enough survived that the national park (established in 2002, heir to the 1968 Parco Nazionale della Calabria) protects the densest woodland of any Italian park. Its patriarchs stand at Fallistro: the Giganti della Sila, a grove of Calabrian pines three and a half centuries old and forty-five metres tall, kept now like a cathedral close.
The plateau's history hinges on two survivals and one invention. The wolf survived here — the Sila and the Abruzzo mountains were the two refugia that carried the Italian population through its mid-century bottleneck, and every wolf now recolonising the Alps owes something to these woods. The forest survived, barely. The lakes were invented: Cecita, Arvo and Ampollino are 1920s–30s hydroelectric reservoirs that flooded the high valleys and accidentally gave the plateau its Nordic scenery of water framed by pines. Red deer, hunted out long ago, were reintroduced beside Lake Cecita and now bellow their autumn ruts through the Bosco di Gallopane.
Life on top is its own economy: Camigliatello and Lorica run small ski lifts in winter and refuge from the coastal furnace in summer; caciocavallo silano DOP ages in tied pairs over every counter; the autumn porcini harvest is competitive to the point of legislation; and the Treno della Sila — a narrow-gauge line steamed by vintage locomotives in season — climbs through the woods to Silvana Mansio, said to be the highest narrow-gauge station in Europe. Norman Douglas walked all of this for Old Calabria in 1915 and found it "a green wilderness"; the phrase still fits.
What's worth knowing before you go
Come up from Cosenza on the SS107 (buses exist; a car serves better) and base at Camigliatello Silano; the Cupone visitor centre on Lake Cecita has the deer enclosures, museums and trailheads. Summer is the point for Calabrians — twenty degrees on the plateau while the coast bakes — and cross-country skiing is the winter trade. The plateau's weather is honestly mountain: fog and thunder on schedule.
The connoisseur's morning is the Fallistro giants just after opening under snow, trunks black against white — then the steam train and a Camigliatello lunch of caciocavallo seared in a pan with porcini, which is the entire plateau on one plate.