Il Parco Nazionale del Pollino

Pollino, with its over one hundred and eighty thousand hectares of extension and with more than one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants, is the largest, most complex and most composite national park in Europe. “The Park of parks” Francesco Bevilacqua likes to call it. If you wanted to know all the natural beauties of the Pollino, all its villages, all its landscapes, all its most unusual views, all its thousand hidden recesses, a lifetime would not be enough. Hence the need for a description adequate to the size of this truly self-contained, original and unique universe of Southern Italy and Europe. A world made, first of all, of varied landscape forms: boundless panoramas, mountain peaks and ridges, dense woods, monumental trees, airy valleys and basins, narrow and sunken gorges, canyons, waterfalls, lakes, rock monuments. But it is also made up of many different mountain massifs, and many different valleys. And then the fifty-six villages, which surround its mountains like a rosary and are often small and solitary, clawed like birds of prey, on impervious rock ridges. But also a world in the ethno-anthropological sense, which contains ethnic groups, languages, traditions, habits, customs and age-old rites. A world where time has stopped, one might say. However, modernity has arrived down here too, and the Pollino has become an open-air laboratory, where new forms of sustainable development are created. This is why, in this book, the author tells the Pollino in all its facets, retraces its centuries-old history, describes its beauties, indicates over one hundred and fifty walking routes to reach the most evocative corners of the park, accompanies the reader with advice practical, shows, in over six hundred photographs, the places in all seasons of the year, in all weather conditions. To offer those who want to visit and learn about the park a rich and at the same time easy tool. But also to give, to the residents themselves, a compendium of memory and beauty, on a territory, an environment, a large community of nature and culture to be preserved, protected and enhanced.