Maiella National Park

Maiella National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Maiella is a huge, rounded limestone massif in the region of Abruzzo, in central Italy, rising abruptly from the hills only thirty kilometres from the Adriatic coast, and its national park, together with the neighbouring Morrone, Porrara and Pizzi ranges, is one of three national parks that make Abruzzo the wildest part of the Apennines. Pescara, on the coast, with an airport and motorway connections to Rome, two hours away, is forty minutes from the northern edge of the park, and the handsome old town of Sulmona lies at its western foot. A car is needed, the park having no gates or fees, only a ring of some forty villages, each with its trailheads, and a number of visitor centres. Four bases serve most purposes. Caramanico Terme, a spa town on the north-western side, is the entrance to the Orfento valley, a deep, wooded gorge with a clear stream, waterfalls and easy marked paths, for which walkers must register, free of charge, at the visitor centre in the town.

Sulmona and the stone village of Pacentro give access to the Morrone and to the hermitages, and to the road over the San Leonardo pass. Pescocostanzo, Roccaraso and Campo di Giove, on the high plateaus of the south, are ski resorts in winter and walking centres in summer. On the eastern side, Fara San Martino, where several of Italy's pasta makers draw their water, stands at the mouth of a gorge so narrow that one can touch both walls, and from Lama dei Peligni, where Apennine chamois are kept in a large enclosure, the long path begins to Monte Amaro. The summit is more easily reached from the end of the road at the Blockhaus, a long day along the crest. Visits to farms, wineries and abbeys on the park's fringes, such as the tastings at estates near Manoppello, show its other face.

Visiting Maiella National Park: what you will see

The park was instituted in 1991 and began to function in 1995, covering about 740 square kilometres, more than half of which lies above a thousand metres, and in 2021 it was recognised as a UNESCO global geopark. The Maiella is unlike the sharp peaks of the Gran Sasso to the north: it is a vast dome of pale limestone, whose summit is a stony, lunar plateau of more than thirty tops over 2,000 metres, culminating in Monte Amaro, 2,793 metres, the second highest mountain of the Apennines, and whose flanks are cut by canyons of great depth, the valleys of the Orfento, Santo Spirito, Selvaromana and Taranta among them. To the people of Abruzzo it is the mother mountain, and legend derives its name from Maia, the mother of Hermes, who died of grief on it. Its steep, secret gorges made it, from the early Middle Ages, a mountain of hermits, and some forty rock hermitages and cliff monasteries survive, the most numerous group in Italy. The most famous of their inhabitants was Pietro Angeleri, called Pietro da Morrone, who lived for decades in caves on these mountains, founded the order later called the Celestines, and in 1294, at the age of about eighty-five, was brought down from his cell above Sulmona and made pope, as Celestine V, by cardinals unable to agree on anyone else;

after five months he did what no pope had done, and abdicated, for which Dante is thought to have placed him among the cowards at the gate of hell, and he died a prisoner of his successor. His hermitages of Santo Spirito a Maiella, San Bartolomeo in Legio, built under an overhanging ledge, Sant'Onofrio al Morrone and San Giovanni all'Orfento, reached by crawling along a ledge, can all be visited on foot. In later centuries the mountain sheltered brigands, who after the unification of Italy in 1861 carved their names and their protests on a slab of rock near the Blockhaus, the Table of the Brigands, and in the winter of 1943 and 1944, when the German Gustav line ran along its southern side, escaped Allied prisoners and Italians crossed the snow-covered Guado di Coccia pass to freedom, a route now walked each year in commemoration, while the Maiella brigade, formed by local partisans, fought all the way to the north. The pastoral past has left hundreds of dry-stone huts shaped like beehives. The wildlife is that of the central Apennines: about ten packs of wolves, the Apennine chamois, reintroduced in 1991 and now more than a thousand strong, red and roe deer, the otter, the wildcat, a few Marsican brown bears which wander in from the neighbouring park, golden eagles, lanner falcons, the dotterel, which nests on the summit plateau, and more than 2,100 species of plants, a third of the Italian flora.

Maiella National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year. The high routes are free of snow from about mid-June to October, and July to September is the season for Monte Amaro, which is a very long walk on a shadeless plateau with no water, where fog can make navigation difficult, so that an early start and a settled forecast are required. May and June are the best months for the gorges, the flowers and the beech woods, and October for the autumn colours, which are superb.

In winter the southern plateaus offer downhill and cross-country skiing, from December to March, and the mountain receives some of the heaviest snowfalls in Italy. Summer weekends bring crowds to the Orfento valley and the hermitages. Carry plenty of water, sun protection and a windproof on the heights. Allow three days. Sulmona, the home of sugared almonds and of Ovid, is fifteen minutes from the park, the abbey of San Clemente a Casauria on the Pescara road, Scanno and the Abruzzo national park an hour south, and Pescara forty minutes.