The moon, the mountains and I. 24 hours alone

"We live as we dream: alone..." Joseph Conrad

August is holiday time for many. The usually quiet mountain village where I live gets crowded. Woods and meadows serve as dining rooms for hundreds of people (and the garbage left behind often echoes their lively voices for a long time...) Even the highest mountain peaks become a common destination for the adventurous citizens on vacation. But this doesn't necessarily mean that I dislike this month or its crowds. It can be fun, just that it spoils a bit the holiness of many places I love and makes really hard to find that special intimacy with nature I am so often looking for.

"If the sun lights up people holidays", I thought, "then the moon can show me the way through the wilderness!" I had luck: the turbulent summer weather gave me a lucky break in correspondence of the last full moon. So, once again, heavy backpack on my shoulders, I was hitting the slope leading to the top of Majella massif with the plan of exploring its vast altitude plateau at night. Alone.

I started at 12AM and met the last people at 5PM: then the mountain was all for me. I walked on and on. Explored ridges and crossed saddles. Looked down to the deepest valleys and up to the fast-moving clouds.

At sunset, I had the purest and simplest light. When night came, I was tired but exhilarated, so I kept on. I dropped my backpack in a little cave and took only a bunch of nuts, my camera and tripod with me. Wind came in full force and didn't leave until the morning. At 11PM I was still shooting the landscape, holding fast my camera to not let the wind toss it to the ground. The moonlight gave the round, barren mountains a touch of indefiniteness. Dark shadows and silvery colors. Deep contrasts and vague horizons.

It was midnight when I went back to the cave, crawled into my sleeping bag and dropped dead. At sunrise, I enjoyed the most perfect stillness. The moon, still high, was now competing with the first sunrays. All around me just blocks of blue, pink and gold.

At 6.47AM, I spotted the first two hikers and then I realized how much exhausted, dehydrated and hungry I was...

Majella: light on the mountain

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” Edward Abbey







Today I live and work 3/4 of my time in Abruzzo, and in my life I have spent countless days among these mountains. Still, my vast knowledge of this region and its nature always suffered from a large blank spot. I never ventured deep into the wildest and most mystical mountain range of all, the Majella massif – the “Mother” mountain for the locals. (The second peak of the Apennines; valleys even 20Km long with no human living in them; the largest wolf population in Abruzzo!) So, when the environmental organization PAN Parks*, which in Italy has given its prestigious certificate only to the Majella National Park, contacted me last September to purchase some images from the area, I was a bit ashamed to say that I didn't have any good picture of it, but I would have been eager to be assigned to cover some spots for them. Excited as seldom before, I began my first explorations in this unknown wilderness (this is indeed Majella: a pure wilderness in the middle of Italy) with several maps in my backpack (there are 4-5 different versions of Majella’s paths network!) and two months in front of me to accomplish the work. I will skip mentioning all the problems I experienced with the weather (this year we had snow already in October), or with the very long distances and demanding, steep slopes, carrying a heavy backpack on some trails that vanished into nothing. But I will say something of the wilderness.
Majella gave me the healthy shock of encountering a wolf 50m from me on a mountain path one morning and the thrill of having two golden eagles soaring above my head another day. I flushed partridges, crossed streams, found primitive handicrafts, spotted chamois on inaccessible cliffs, walked on tundra-like plateaus, heard the call of the wallcreeper – many times, camped at 2790m asl with -10°C, touched two walls of a canyon by stretching my arms, saw the milky way cross the whole sky and had the incredible luxury of getting lost – three times!

I don’t know many other places here in Italy where all these things can still be found and experienced at such level. I commend the National Park for the groundbreaking commitment in preserving and rewilding these mountains, against all the odds and the public opinion. Come to visit Majella to see this with your own eyes, and give me a call, I would be happy to show you around.


*PAN Parks is a cool organization, working hard to find a way both to protect Europe's wilderness and help the local communities to develop a sustainable economy. I am really glad to have contributed a bit to their mission with my work.
Click on the bear to visit the PAN Parks website.