Wild Italy: A Traveller's Guide

by Tim Jepson

In Wild Italy , Tim Jepson leaves the well-worn tourist haunts of traditional guide books behind him in search of fresher pleasures. He offers a rural, rather than an urban Italy, revealing the best of the long walks, mountain hideaways, woods, plains, sea coasts and remote islands where travelers can still find a refuge from the modern world. He explores the whole country from its Alp-studded waist to its distant toe kicking the football of Sicily towards Africa. Like an unhurried lover, he works his way down thigh and shin, following the line of the Apennines, locating the pressure points between continental and peninsular Italy, pinching to see where the prosperous north gives way to the Mediterranean south, looking for those last empty stretches of littoral, down one side and up the other, where the bathers have yet to set up their parasols. Having lived in Rome and trekked the entire peninsula, Tim Jepson knows the secret places that are as oxygen to a suffocating man after the murderous drive through the suburbs of Milan or Naples. He has picked out the loveliest spots in Sicily and Sardinia and plotted the last few pinpricks of Italian territory, the scattered islands off the Tunisian coast which are some of the most isolated and primitive places in Europe. An extensive knowledge of, and deep passion for wild Italy are reflected in Jepson's writing. "One view of a cypress tree or stone farm-house and we are entranced," he writes, "overcome by that longing for the warm south which Icelanders describe nicely as 'the need for figs'."

Genres: Italy

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Tim Jepson is a British, London-based writer, traveler, and broadcaster. He began his traveling life at the age of 12, exploring the mountains of Britain and Ireland. After graduating from Oxford University, he lived and worked in Italy, writing for a variety of British newspapers and leading high-level expeditions in the country’s remotest corners.

Reviews

[Tim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A photographic guidebook to the wild regions of Italy, though as it is copyright 1994, as far as a guide to things like rail information or phone numbers for the various locations detailed, decades out of date.

So what’s left? A nice tour of the natural beauty of Italy, detailed in readable accounts using the author’s personal experiences and with numerous color photos and not a few black and white illustrations. The black and white illustrations are decent, but the color photos are very nice. Author Tim Jepson has divided all of Italy into nine chapters and talks about in the guide his experiences as well in each entry notes prominent natural features, paying particular attention to noteworthy plants, butterflies, geology, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, human history, and often most of all bird life.

First the introduction, where the author wrote about that though in the popular imagination, Italy is “pastoral vignettes of vines, olives and cypress-topped hills melting into the haze of a summer afternoon,” a countryside that “is the ordered work of centuries, tilled and tamed by peasants since the dawn of history,” that “behind this veneer lie vast areas of wilderness, from the glacier-carved cirques of the Dolomites to the sun-scorched plains of the Sardinian interior” to the vultures and eagles that wheel in Sicily’s skies to lynx that sill pad the Tarvisian forests to the wolves that still roam the mountains of the Apennines. Jepson covers the Western Aps and the Italian Riveria; among other things the land of Europe’s three highest mountains (Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, and the Matterhorn or Monte Cervino), Europe’s highest protected area (the Valsesia, home to chamois, marmots, golden eagles, and villages where Walser, a Germanic language, is still spoken), Gran Paradiso (Italy’s oldest national park, famed for its ibex), and Alpi Marittime (1,300 plant species and a number of alpine bird and butterfly species).

Then The Dolomites and the Central Alps, “a Gothic fantasy of crenellated spires and splintered peaks, saw-toothed ridges and fearsome chasms;” among other sites are Gruppo di Tessa (Germanic culture, famous alpine lakes, chamois, and several species of grouse), Stelvio (Italy’s largest protected area, glaciers, ibex, and brown bears), and Paneveggio (once source of wood for the Venetian fleet as well as for Stradivarius, now home to many alpine wildflower species).

Next, the Venetian Plain and the Eastern Alps, that though they are one of the most densely populated areas of Italy and there are vast areas that are “monotonous prairies of corn, seeded on reclaim land and broken only by rows of poplars and church towers,” there are still wonders, as the “country’s most extensive lagoons make the region a staging post for vast numbers of migratory birds, and the easternmost Alps are some of the wildest, most beautiful parts of Italy;” sites include Monte Baldo (it’s “immense botanical variety” leading the area to be called Hortus Italiae, “Garden of Italy”), Monti Lessini and Pasubio (“the territory was one of the most bitterly contested in Italy” in World War I,” but today has “entire meadows” of edelweiss), Cansiglio (“Wood of Oars” to Venice, source of timber for the oars for the galleys, now home to many forest birds such as the Orphean warbler as well as Italy’s first speleological reserve), Laguna di Marano and Laguna di Grado (“Italy’s second largest lagoon complex” and vital wetland migratory bird refuge, including the rare goldeneyes (“Quattrocchi, or “four-eyes”, in Italian”)), and Carso (endemic plants, numerous caves, and the cave-dwelling aquatic salamander known as the olm).

Next, the Po Delta and the Northern Apennines, which includes Italy’s longest river ending in the Po Delta, “known as the “Italian Camargue” and one of Europe’s great birdwatching areas;” the vast numbers of migratory waterfowl of Delta Padano including ducks, geese, coots, terns, and egrets, Torrile (home to a rare subspecies of Italian spadefoot toad), Malatina (strange rock outcrops and tors known as sassi as well as bubbling pools of volcanic mud called vulcanelli), and the Sibillini (with its upland plains or piani, surrounded on all sides by mountains, filling with roiling mists at times, creating a “solemn amphitheater” but in spring “ablaze with a feast of wildflowers”).

Then, Tuscany and Umbria, which to many people IS Italy, a land of “banished wilderness” and instead one of “vineyards, woods and gentle hills” that “are a picture of pastoral harmony” but nevertheless has wild areas; notable sites include Alpi Apuana (dramatic rocky scenery including the Procinto, a pillar of rock mentioned by Dante in his _Divine Comedy_ as well as 250 miles of caves, including the deepest in Italy, Antro del Corchia, at 4000 feet deep; also the source of the marble used by Michelangelo), Bolgheri (many bird species, including black-winged stilts also known as knights of Italy), and Parco Nazionale d’Arcipelago Toscano (includes Napoleon’s place of temporary exile on Elba and wooded Montecristo, home of Alexandre Dumas’ fictional Count as well as endemic plants and breeding colonies of seabirds including the Audouin’s Gull, the rarest breeding gull in Europe).

Abruzzo is next, “some of the wildest and most beautiful country in Itay,” “still a land that could provide settings for a dozen fairy tales, with its wolves and bears, sturdy country folk, woodsmen and shepherds,” a land that is the most completely mountainous and the least populated in the country. Highlights include Gran Sasso d’Italia (“Big Rock of Italy,” the highest and possibly most spectacular mountain on the Italian peninsula) and Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo (a former royal hunting reserve, “last major refuge in central Itay for the wolf, bear and Apennine chamois” as well as home to an endemic species of iris, Iris marsica).

Then the Mediterranean Coast, home to Vesuvius (looming over Naples, the volcanic slopes also home to many rare or even endemic plants), the species rich volcanic lakes of Lago di Vico and Monti Cimini with rare plants and breeding birds like the great crested grebe, Posta Fibreno (what’s left of the famed Pontine marshes, noted for floating islands of vegetation), Oasis di Serre Persano (a rare clean river in Italy, vital migratory bird area, and home to the last substantial population of otters in Italy), and Cilento (with many caves).

Next, the South of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, “land of the midday sun,” an area “bedeviled by poverty, emigration and a harsh natural regime” and though the uplands might be as verdant as the Highlands of Scotland, “for the most part the landscape is a harsh Mediterranean ensemble of vines, olives and barren sun-scorched slopes,” much of the land of Basilicata “eerie and desolate” though some areas of Calabria preserve “something of Italy’s real heart: rolling hills, streams, verdant pastures and vast woodlands.” Highlights include Gargano and Foresta Umbra (many rare plants including a number that are really Balkan species), Isole Tremiti (three islands, the 300 foot high Ripa dei Falconei cliff on the biggest island, San Domino, was used in the movie _The Guns of Navarone though the falcons that once nested there are depleted; today the islands are home to nesting Manx and Cory’s shearwaters), Salina di Margherita di Savonia (salt flats that attract thousands of ducks, avocets, gulls, and egrets as well as small flocks of spoonbills), and Pollino (has “the wolf and the golden eagle, both relatively prominent”).

The final section is Sicily and Sardinia, the two largest islands of the Mediterranean, Sicily especially prominent in Greek mythology (“Sicily is the beautiful island of Persephone, the goddess of spring”). Highlights include Etna (a relatively young volcano at only 60,000 years old, “is probably the single most monumental landform in the Mediterranean”; nearby are the lava stacks of Aci Castello near Catania, “rocks which the Cyclops hurled at the escaping Ulysses”), Madonie (second in height to Mount Etna, a Sicilian reserve that has many species of birds of prey as well as an endemic fir tree species, Abies nebrodensis), Zingaro (also on Sicily, “the one area in Italy where Europe’s only indigenous palm can be said to form woods,” the 7 foot tall dwarf fan palm), Monti del Gennargentu (on Sardinia, has rare plants, the last Italian mouflon, the black vulture, Audouin’s gulls, Elenaora’s flacons, and the Mediterranean monk seal), Molentargius (wetland on Sardinia, thousands of flamingos), and Monte Arcosu (Sardinian reserve famed for the 3 foot tall Corsican red deer – Cervus elaphus corsicanus – at the time of writing extinct on Corsica).

Has as the other books in the series do a series of good regional maps.