The village
of the woods

© Photo: Andrea Barghi

By ancient tradition, the Badiani know how to make anything out of wood, and even today you can come across a person making a piece of furniture or a simple wooden bowl out of beech wood. But living of the forest, among maples and lindens, ash and chestnut, beeches and firs, also means being a coveted destination for environmentalists and holiday-makers.

At the turn of the century hotels and pensions sprang up in Badia Prataglia and the village still shows the signs of that period in its Alpine-style houses. Today the woods around the village have been declared a nature preserve to defend the biodiversity of plant species. The preserve is part of Casentino Forests National Park.

Badia is the largest village in the park and is the site of a visitors' centre and a forestry museum named after a great 19th century sylviculturist, Karl Siemon. Siemon is a mythical personage, probably the illegitimate son of the emperor of Austria, and is credited with the rebirth of the Casentino forests.

Discovering Badia Prataglia means getting to know a story of trees but especially of men: foresters, loggers, and carpenters. It is a community huddled around the ancient abbey, or rather the abbey's Romanesque church, which is all that remains. It is a monument that, as often happens in Casentino, is laden with suggestion: a crypt, two capitals from a mysterious, pre-existing Roman edifice, the figure of a praying woman. The same symbol adorns the Romanesque parish church of another Casentino village, Montemignaio, also inhabited by mountain folk and woodsmen. Only a coincidence?

Going north from Badia Prataglia along the panoramic crest road one reaches the Hermitage, followed by the Monastery of Camaldoli. The historical, spiritual and environmental importance of Camaldoli is absolute. The view of the majestic monastery or that of the tidy monks' cells, set among the firs, remains serenely impressed in the heart.

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