GRAN SASSO. IL GIGANTE DEL SUD

by Stefano Ardito, Solferino.
Paolo Paci talks to the author

Exploration of a great Italian mountain.

Gran Sasso, which is the highest mountain in the Apennines at 2912 metres, is today hugely popular, a place offering challenging hikes and demanding rockfaces, mountain refuges, via ferrata, and hundreds of kilometres of marked footpaths. However, Gran Sasso is not just a site of natural beauty and sporting activities. Its tablelands and valleys have seen Mussolini's imprisonment and wartime resistance, the ruinous earthquakes in Aquila and Amatrice, the Rigopiano avalanche, and valuable work by researchers scrutinising the cosmos from laboratories dug deep in the bowels of the mountain. These interweaving relationships have transformed a vast silent mountain made up of rock and snow into a place characterised by work, excitement and life.