Il Parco del Reventino

Year: 2008 Format: 17x24 Pages: 574 Photos: col Historical-naturalistic and hiking guide to the Mancuso, Reventino, Tiriolo and Gimigliano mountain group, with 135 itineraries, 570 color photos and the excursion map. This book is dedicated to a small-large mountainous area in Southern Italy. Small because it is less vast and less known than the other main mountain massifs, including Calabrian ones, which have become national parks. Large because it is still extensive, almost from coast to coast, includes 19 municipalities, contains extraordinary natural beauties: mountains with panoramas that extend as far as Sicily and Pollino and embrace the two seas at a glance, ancestral forests, trees monuments, large valleys, gorges and river canyons, waterfalls, rock monuments, solitary and perched villages, rural architecture that seems to come out of a fairy tale, countryside with a rural and bucolic appearance, ancient signs of man (ruins of abbeys, shelters of farmers and shepherds, paths and mule tracks, aquariums). There is even an old narrow-gauge railway that crosses it from side to side, one of the last remaining in operation in Italy. In the Reventino mountain group, time passes slowly, among elegant vegetable gardens and boundless woods. There you can still find shepherds and farmers producing food as they once did. The smells and flavors of the ancient Apennine mountains have not been erased. Of course, the agro-forestry-pastoral economy of this as well as other areas of the South has been experiencing a profound crisis for years. But the attachment of the old inhabitants to their traditions and the innovation brought about by some enterprising young people are gradually creating a different quality of development, in which the rediscovery of places has a prominent role. And it is precisely to encourage this rediscovery - which is also a way to affirm an identity - that this guide was born. Preceded by a preface by Fulco Pratesi, it offers an accurate examination of the history, natural environments, flora, fauna and problems of conservation and development of the area.