Foreste Casentinesi

The Foreste Casentinesi, Monte Falterona and Campigna National Park was created in 1993 and extends across the Apennine divide between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, dropping abruptly down the parallel valleys of the Romagna side and more gently down the Tuscan one, towards the broad valley of the Arno. It protects one of the most extensive and best-conserved forest complexes in Italy.

Its jewel is the Sasso Fratino Strict Nature Reserve, established in 1959 in the municipalities of Bagno di Romagna and Santa Sofia: it was the first strict reserve in Italy and protects 784 hectares of rocky, steep hillside whose inaccessibility saved it from forestry. Research by the University of Tuscia, coordinated with the park administration and the Carabinieri Forestali, has documented beeches there more than 500 years old, at the known limit of longevity for deciduous broadleaves, which places Sasso Fratino among the ten oldest deciduous forests in the whole northern hemisphere. Access to the reserve is forbidden.

On 7 July 2017, at the 41st session of the World Heritage Committee held in Kraków, the ancient beech forests of the park and the Sasso Fratino reserve were added to the serial property Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, extending to ten countries a recognition that had existed since 2007. The area designated within the park totals some 7,724 hectares of core and buffer, the largest of the Italian components. The fauna is that characteristic of the Apennines: Apennine wolf, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, wildcat and a rich woodland birdlife, including several woodpeckers tied to dead wood.