Casentino Forests National Park

It is one of the protected areas of the latest generation, created in 1993, and links the Alpine parks of northern Italy with the large protected areas of central Italy. It is very hard to explain the importance of this national park, which contains some of the most famous forests of Europe, but also sacred places known throughout Christendom.

The protected area begins in the foothills, where old abandoned farms are still often found, the houses attacked by brambles. Higher up the woods makes it appearance, first oaks, then chestnuts, finally silver fir and beech.

The most authentic dimension of this park is the forest. Great woods of firs, their trunks over forty metres high, and vast tracts of beeches, which in autumn are coloured with the red of the leaves and the grey of the fog, are populated by a rich fauna. Fallow deer, roe deer, and especially red deer are the most common of the larger animals, while the great predators, the wolf and the golden eagle, are harder to spot.

A few scattered human settlements are ‘immersed’ in this environment, and have been for centuries. First and foremost the sacred places, like the Hermitage and Monastery of Camaldoli and the Sanctuary of La Verna, the holy mountain of St Francis of Assisi. And then the tiny communities that still draw their livelihood from the mountain, such as Badia Prataglia, Serravalle, and Moggiona. Higher up there is nothing but the crest of the Apennines, culminating in Monte Falterona, source of the Arno and a sacred place for the Etruscans.

The National Park is therefore a young institution but the history of the relationship between man and nature, in these parts, is truly old indeed. It is nearly a millennium since the monks of Camaldoli wrote their Rule: the firs were to be the columns of their natural temple. Later the ‘code of the forest’ was born and the monks learned to identify with the trees. St Francis considered animals and plants alike to be his ‘brothers’, and at La Verna he taught his followers to cultivate the woods according to nature. The rest of the forests, the old feudal domain of the Counts Guidi, belonged, in the late 14th century, to the Florentine Republic, which cultivated them with care and used them in building the cathedral. The fir trunks were hauled along the logging roads to Pratovecchio, where they were floated down the Arno. Later, in the 19th century, the Grand Duke summoned from Bohemia a mysterious sylviculturist, Karl Siemon, an extraordinary person who gave new life to these woods.

Today, from these forests, which include the first nature preserve in Europe (Sassofratino), the park launches a new message. The days of the protected area understood a series of natural wonders, or as oases to subtract from a by now planetary pollution, are over, and this territory proposes a new model, an example of ancient compatibility between the life of man and that of nature. The goal - utopian but necessary for the future of the earth’s ecosystem - is to make the whole biosphere into a park.