Italy’s spine keeps Europe’s last big predators in green parks
The Apennines run about 1,200 kilometres down peninsular Italy from the Ligurian Alps at Altare to Reggio di Calabria’s toe. Verdant parallel chains still shelter some of Europe’s best-preserved forests and montane grasslands—and refuge for large predators—inside national parks, alongside Bronze Age herding traces.
Eastern slopes fall steeply to the Adriatic; western ones drop more gently toward the Tyrrhenian. Corno Grande holds Calderone, the range’s only glacier, on one flank. A popular etymology hears Celtic penn, “summit,” in A-penn-inus from northern Celtic centuries, though linguists still argue details against Irish cenn parallels.
The mountains name the Apennine Peninsula itself, reminding Romans and modern Italians alike that Italy is first a highland country.
People have grazed these mountains for a very long time. The Apennine culture of the Middle Bronze Age, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, belonged to cattle herders who shifted between summer pastures and lived in small defensible hamlets, caves and rock shelters. Their burnished pottery, incised with spirals and meanders, turns up as far off as Rome's Capitoline Hill and the islands of Ischia and Lipari. The range is also the final stronghold of the Italian wolf and the Marsican brown bear, both gone from the rest of Central Europe.
Geographers split the chain into northern, central and southern sectors. At its northwestern end it meets the Ligurian Alps at the Bocchetta di Altare, a 436-metre pass that has long been the only practical overland link between the Ligurian coast and the northern plain. Monte Cimone, at 2,165 metres, crowns the Tuscan–Emilian stretch, which railway builders have tunnelled since 1856; the Great Apennine Tunnel on the 1934 Direttissima line runs 18.5 kilometres. Long-distance paths, including European route E1 and the Grand Italian Trail, follow the ridges.
Source: Apennine Mountains
