Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise

Founded in 1922 — the same year as Gran Paradiso — as one of Italy's first national parks, it was created to protect the Marsican brown bear, a subspecies endemic to the central Apennines that survives today with barely fifty animals, and which has made this park the principal symbol of large-carnivore conservation in Italy. It was also central to the recovery of the Apennine wolf, whose population had fallen to a handful of family groups by the 1970s.