Description:
#fidenetrekking #abruzzotrekking1962 #grottapetrunilla #monteguardia #marcellina #pratofavale #pratonedelcampitello #pratonedelmontegennaro #palombarasabina A cave is a large natural underground space where at least one human can enter. It is a natural void in the ground, also known as a cavern. The science of cave exploration is called speleogenesis. On the way up, usually everything goes smoothly. The elevation changes are modest, within reach of city lungs and calves. And to guide the way, the thread of the trail pointing to the summit is enough. Trouble starts on the way back. Because this mountain is like that. It seems small. And yet, despite the modesty of those 1271 meters of altitude and the homely air of an Apennine that's right there, a step away, clearly visible in front of the Gianicolo or Ponte Flaminio, Monte Gennaro boasts a rate of lost hikers that would make the Blanc envious. Here's the thing, Sunday hikers get lost (almost every Sunday someone) returning to the valley, at the height of that trail intersection. They climbed the trails starting from near Marcellina or San Polo dei Cavalieri. They reached Pratone, or even beyond Schiene degli asini to the Gennaro summit. Then, descending Valle Cavalera, full of picnic digestion, just a step from the asphalt road where the trail seems to want to climb again, they saw on the left that inviting descent: the trap of Fosso di Valle Fura which, in no time, precipitates the unfortunate into the jaws of a thorny and spiny labyrinth. Gullies, ditches, cliffs and ravines~ brambles, butcher's broom and tear-trousers. In the end, sucked into a sort of whirlpool, the lost ones almost regularly end up at the bottom of the Fosso dei Ronci funnel. "So often when they arrive we are already there waiting for them," explains Vincenzo Lattanzi, head of the Marcellina office of the Parco dei Monti Lucretili. Recovery of the lost, around here, is almost routine. "And the emergency maybe resolves in a couple of hours from the alarm. But every time it ends up engaging about twenty people between carabinieri, volunteers, forest guards, firefighters." And the accident is always lurking; just think of a year ago, when a helicopter with five people on board, descending a ravine in search of a group of lost hikers, crashed into an electrical pylon. "Unfortunately, perhaps because it's so close to Rome, many think climbing Gennaro is a bit like going to Villa Borghese. But this is a real mountain. And it must be respected, without carelessness. Especially considering that the orography of the area is very jagged. From afar everything seems simple. But when you're inside, getting lost is very easy." Chubby and folksy, but also rude and shaggy, Monte Gennaro as one immediately guesses, looking at that karst face, pockmarked with caves and dolines and incised by the wrinkles of a thousand narrow passages, exhibits this particular, scurvy personality also through images of unique vegetation, marked by some arcane kinship. No one knows how to explain it well. But there are plants that in Italy you can only encounter in these places. See storax, Styrax officinalis, a shrub elevated since 1989 to the symbol of the Lucretili park, which in May fills the air with a subtle vanilla scent. And many other species that show surprising links with trees and shrubs of Balkan and Asian origin. Certainly this two-faced mountain, with the western face exposed to the sun and Mediterranean influences and the eastern one, colder and open to Central European currents, presents itself as an exceptional botanical blend. Although then, beyond nomenclature, knowing whether that hard and weathered trunk is or not a cornelian cherry, or if "lu fau bellu", the beautiful beech, with its eight or nine meters in diameter, actually has, as they say, half a millennium of life, assumes relative importance. What matters, in the end, is the visual impact. And this mountain is full of surprises. Seen from Rome, the massive profile of Gennaro is a constitutive element of the Capitoline panoramas, sung since Horace's times and included, almost as a ritual background, in many Roman countryside landscapes. Already the simple reversal of perspective, Rome seen from Gennaro, has its suggestion. The view (and there's no need to reach the summit because beautiful terraces are also found lower down, within car range), fog permitting, reaches the dome of San Pietro, the EUR Mushroom and, even further, the sparkle of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Keywords:
Video length: 28:49