Italy

Italy's elongated shape, with the Alps to the north and the Apennines running down it like a spine as far as Sicily, produces an exceptional ecological gradient that goes from glacier to coastal desert in under a thousand kilometres. The Alps keep ibex, marmots, chamois and a growing bear population in Trentino; the Apennines hold the Italian wolf, which never quite died out and from there has recolonised France and Switzerland, and the Marsican brown bear, an isolated subspecies of which little more than sixty animals survive. The Mediterranean south and the islands add endemics: Sardinia keeps the mouflon, the Sardinian red deer and the occasional monk seal; Sicily already looks towards Africa in its fauna. The Strait of Messina and the Sicilian Channel are migration funnels for raptors, and the Tyrrhenian Sea forms part of the Pelagos Sanctuary, the largest protected area for cetaceans in the Mediterranean.