Pescasseroli
Discover Pescasseroli
A concise introduction to Pescasseroli, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Pescasseroli is a mountain village of roughly two thousand people at 1,167 metres, in the upper valley of the Sangro in the province of L'Aquila.
It is the administrative seat of the Parco Nazionale d'Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise, established in 1922 and the oldest national park in Italy still in existence, and the park's visitor centre and wildlife area are in the village.
The animal the park was made for is the Marsican brown bear, a subspecies confined to these mountains with a population counted in the tens. Apennine wolves, red deer and reintroduced Abruzzo chamois share the same forest.
Benedetto Croce, the philosopher, was born here in 1866, and his family house stands in the old centre.
The village is also the northern end of the Tratturo Pescasseroli-Candela, one of the great drove roads along which sheep were walked to Puglia every autumn for centuries.
Around all of that is beech forest, some of it never cut.