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...going
through parks and natural reserves
Protected
areas in Marche Region offer a good opportunity to plunge into
environments rich in history, tradition, culture and art. If you visit
them you will be reconciled to nature. You will rediscover smells, noises,
and colour already met in the past but forgotten. In comparison with the
ones in other regions, parks in Marche Region are mild, harmonious,
striking and unpredictable like their region, butterfly hey are very rich
in nature, history and art as well, exactly as Marche Region is. If you
follow the traces of a particular butterfly or flower or fruit you will be
likely to run into the traces left by hard-working monks or by ancient
Piceni or Roman, Benedictine or late Gallic or Byzantine settlements.
Historical facts are interlaced with the landscape: it involves the
complementary rediscovery of the ancient jobs practised by people who have
never given up going often to woods, rivers, paths. They are under the
protection of the Parks today as well they were jealously defended by
their inhabitants in the past. Tools are collected in special museums or
in possession of people still practising ancient jobs. They represent the
other side of a joint world you can live again by searching your memory
and the roots of the present specific “modello marchigiano”
which can be applied to parks more than somewhere else. The visitor of the
parks will also learn that centuries ago men completely integrated into
the life of nature traced the paths suggested by the guides. He will
easily understand the negativiness of a way of life far from that model,
compelling him to destroy nature and to be able to affortd polluted
congested houses, power, and means of transport. In Marche Region there
are six parks and three natural reserves. Two regional parks are in the
province of Pesaro-Urbino: Sasso Simone and Simoncello towards the inland
of the Apennines and Monte S. Bartolo, along the coast, close to Gabicce
Mare and Pesaro. Other two ones are in the province of Ancona: one is in
the heart of the Apennines, in the Gola della Rossa e di Frasassi; the
other, the Regional Park of Monte Conero, represents the continuation on
the sea of the city of Ancona. Southward, between the Province of Macerata
and Ascoli Piceno, there is the large Monti Sibillini National Park:
thirty kilometres of mountains with more than twenty summits at an
altitude of over two thousands metres, Sibilla’s Cave, the Infernaccio,
Pilato’s Lak representing an indissoluble tie of reality to legend in a
wild uncontaminated nature. In the Province of Ascoli Piceno you can also
visit Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park, of which about 10.000
hectares belonging to Marche Region. Two Natural Reserves are in the
Province of Macerata: Abbadia of Fiastra
and Torricchio Reserve;
and one in the Province of Pesaro-Urbino, Gola
del Furlo Reserve. Either if the tourist chooses the massif of Sasso
Simone and Simoncello, with the deep badlands on the
mountainsides sheer to the valley and follows the suggested paths from
Saint Sisto to Sasso Simone, or from Scavolino to Mount Carpegna, or from
the plain to Sasso Simone; or if he starts his walk by visiting the
calcareous sculptures made by water in Frasassi Caves, in Gola
della Rossa e di Frasassi Park, going on Scappuccia Valley.
And if from the hinterland of the Apennines he goes down to the
coast, he will visit Pesaro, Rossini’s town, Recanati, Gigli and
Leopardi’s town, or Madonna di Loreto Shrine, and it would be a pity not
to stop a Monte San Bartolo Park, or Monte
Conero Park and discover two mountain plunged in a vertical
drop to the Adriatic Sea, with rare bays, woods, paths, villas, hermitages
and world-famous places such as Portonovo, Sirolo and Numana. If you visit
Monti Sibillini National Park you can also see the Natural Reserves of
Abbadia of Fiastra and of Torricchio, the ancient towns of Urbisaglia,
Macerata, Tolentino, Cameino and the historical centre of Ascoli Piceno
and Arquata del Tronto, the only town in Italy between two National Parks
which are Monti Sibillini Park and Gran Sasso
and Monti della Laga Park.
© 2001 Liberation Ventures Ltd.
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