Trekking in the Apennines. Gillian Price

Stage 15 Lago Scaffaiolo to Boscolungo

       Stage 16 Boscolungo to Lago Santo Modenese

       Stage 17 Lago Santo Modenese to Passo delle Radici

       Stage 18 Passo delle Radici to Passo di Pradarena

       Stage 19 Passo di Pradarena to Passo del Cerreto

       Stage 20 Passo del Cerreto to Prato Spilla

       Stage 21 Prato Spilla to Lago Santo Parmense

       Stage 22 Lago Santo Parmense to Passo della Cisa

       Stage 23 Passo della Cisa to Passo Due Santi

       Appendix A Route summary table

       Appendix B Italian–English glossary

       Appendix C Useful contacts

       Appendix D Background reading

      On the way up to Colle Bruciata (Stage 17)

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

      Between Colla di Casaglia and Badia Moscheta (Stage 7)

      After 10 years away from the Apennine mountains, it was with great pleasure – and relief – that I discovered very little has changed on this memorable trek. Long rambles in solitude are still the flavour of the day, while a steady trickle of pilgrims on the Franciscan trails are now found in the trek’s southern parts. The forests are still vast and magical, the village inhabitants as friendly as ever and the meals thankfully mouth-wateringly delicious. The few notable differences – changes for the better – are the hugely improved waymarking and the places where the GEA has been rerouted to take in more superbly scenic ridges and summits.

      Gillian Price, 2015

      En route to Poggio Scali (Stage 5)

INTRODUCTION

      Your peaks are beautiful, ye Apennines!

      In the soft light of these serenest skies;

      From the broad highland region, black with pines,

      Fair as the hills of Paradise they rise.

      To the Apennines, William Cullen Bryant, 1835

      The mountainous Apennines, without a doubt, are Italy’s best-kept secret. Forming the rugged spine of the slender Italian peninsula, they seem to provide support as it ventures out into the Mediterranean. For walkers this glorious elongated range provides thousands of kilometres of marked walking trails over stunning panoramic ridges and stupendous forested valleys, touching on quiet rural communities little affected by mass tourism. Dotted throughout are historic sanctuaries, hospitable mountain inns, national parks and nature reserves home to wildlife and marvellous wildflowers, incredible roads and passes that testify to feats of engineering, and stark memorials to the terrible events of World War II.

The Apennines

      The Apennine chain runs along the entire length of Italy and clocks up some 1400km from the link with the Alps close to the French border, all the way south to the Straits of Messina, even extending over to Sicily. The highest peak is the 2912m Corno Grande in Italy’s southern Abruzzo region. As a formidable barrier that splits the country in two lengthways, the range has witnessed centuries of wars and skirmishes, alternating with the passage of traders, pilgrims and daring bandits.

      Heading towards Libro Aperto (Stage 15)

      The rock is, by and large, sedimentary in nature – sandstone, shale and some limestone – deposited in an ancient sea during the Mesozoic era (245–66 million years ago). The mountains were formed immediately after their neighbours, the Alps, when – some 66 million years ago, and climaxing around two million years BCE – remnants of the African plate were forced together and squeezed upwards, little by little.

      Both volcanic and seismic activity shaped the Apennines, though ancient ice masses also played a part. Tell-tale clues are sheltered cirques like giant armchairs, once filled by ice from a glacier tongue and nowadays more often than not home to a lake or tarn. The present aspect of the Apennines – steep, rough western flanks overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, in contrast to the relatively gentler slopes on the eastern Adriatic side – is due mainly to recent erosion by water.

      Evidence has been unearthed of man’s presence since prehistoric times, some 7000 years ago. The northern Apennines were then the stronghold of the ancient Liguri or Ligurian people (as the colonising Romans found out to their detriment over the 150 years it took to get the fierce tribes to accept domination). We are probably indebted to them for the very name Apennines: the root ‘penn’ (for an isolated peak) is found throughout Italy. In another version Pennine was a divinity believed to reside on the inhospitable summits, while a further interpretation attributes the name to King Api, last of the Italic gods.

      Over time well-trodden paths conveyed waves of passers-by, such as devotees on the Via Francigena which led from Canterbury to Rome. For the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri, the Apennines were a source of inspiration for ‘The Divine Comedy’; the same holds true for Petrarch and Boccaccio. German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, revelling in sun-blessed Italy, was heading south towards Rome in October 1786, and wrote: ‘I find the Apennines a remarkable part of the world. Upon the great plain of the Po basin there follows a mountain range that rises from the depths, between two seas, to end the continent on the south…it is a curious web of mountain ridges facing each other.’

      From their base near the Tyrrhenian coast, both Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley were inspired by the Apennines, which made appearances in their respective works Valperga and ‘The Witch of Atlas’.

      The ‘romantic’ wild woods and mountainous ridges were long the realm of smugglers, woodcutters and charcoal burners. The latter were renowned as a wild mob who moved from camp to camp erecting huge compact mounds of cut branches that underwent slow round-the-clock combustion. Their circular cleared work platforms are still visible. Plaques recording the passage of indefatigable Giuseppe Garibaldi are not unusual. Instigator of the unification of northern Italy with Sicily and the south in 1861 under the Kingdom of the House of Savoy, he crossed the Apennines on one of his campaigns, his ranks swelled by Robin Hood-style bandits in revolt in the Romagna region against harsh taxes and the Austrian occupation.

      Lovely Lago Scaffaiolo (Stage 14)

      The central and northern Apennines were subjected to widespread devastation in the latter years of World War II. Once fascist Italy had recapitulated and signed a peace agreement with the Allies in 1943, the Germans turned into occupying forces and dug themselves in to prepare for the inevitable advance which thankfully led to the liberation of the whole country in 1945. Massive defences were constructed in 1944 – the so-called Gothic Line – that stretched coast-to-coast across the peninsula, entailing drastically clearing ridges to enable control of strategic passes along with key communication routes. Although a sea of green has now all but obliterated signs of battle, there are poignant reminders in the shape of war cemeteries and memorials to the Italian partisans, former soldiers who sprang into action after the armistice, working closely in liaison with Allied servicemen