Monti Sibillini

Monti Sibillini National Park was created in 1993 in the central Apennines, straddling Umbria and the Marche, and protects a limestone massif rising above 2,400 metres at Monte Vettore. Its name comes from the medieval legend of the Sibyl, the prophetess whom tradition placed in a cave in these mountains, an imagery that drew travellers and necromancers for centuries.

Its most celebrated landscape is the Piano Grande of Castelluccio, a broad karst plateau of lacustrine origin ringed by mountains, without trees or surface watercourses because everything drains underground. Each summer, the simultaneous flowering of the cultivated lentils and the wild plants tints the plain in bands of colour in a phenomenon that has become the park's symbol. Beside it, the system of Castelluccio plateaux preserves a centuries-old agro-pastoral landscape that depends on the traditional crop being maintained.

Beneath the eastern wall of Vettore lies Lake Pilato, a small high-altitude glacial lake of changing shape, the only one of glacial origin in the Apennines. It is home to Chirocephalus marchesonii, an endemic branchiopod crustacean that exists nowhere else in the world and whose survival depends on the lake not drying out, something increasingly frequent. The park's wildlife includes Apennine wolf, wildcat, roe deer and a cliff-dwelling birdlife with golden eagle. The 2016 earthquakes caused severe damage in the villages of the park, including the near-total destruction of Castelluccio.