Italy
Campo Imperatore
A vast high plateau called Italy's Little Tibet, barren, wind-scoured, impossibly empty.
The plateau stretches to every horizon, treeless and wind-scoured. Grass ripples like water under a sky so large it leans on you. Nothing softens the landscape: no villages, no fences, only altitude, light and the wall of the Gran Sasso catching cloud.
Campo Imperatore spreads for roughly 27 kilometres at around 1,800 metres in Abruzzo's Gran Sasso, a bareness that earned it the nickname Italy's Little Tibet and a second career standing in for Tibet and the steppe in Italian cinema. Semi-wild horses graze it, wolves cross it, and Marsican bears survive in the park around it. At 2,130 metres, the Hotel Campo Imperatore held Mussolini under arrest in 1943 until gliders landed on the grass and took him off the mountain in one of the war's strangest raids. An observatory has watched some of central Italy's darkest skies from the plateau since 1951.
Solo
Hike the plateau alone and the emptiness becomes the point: wind, grass and cloud shadows the size of villages.
Friends
Bike the grasslands, summit the Corno Grande or ski the winter slopes, then descend on arrosticini; this landscape likes company that fights back.
- Roughly 27 kilometres of treeless plateau at 1,800 metres earned the name Italy's Little Tibet.
- Gliders landed on this grass in 1943 to lift Mussolini out of his mountain-hotel prison.
- An observatory has used the plateau's dark skies since 1951, with summer stargazing visits.
- Wolves and Marsican brown bears still live in the surrounding Gran Sasso park.
Arrosticini, thin skewers of sheep meat, char over roadside coals on the way off the plateau.
L'Aquila saffron, two hundred thousand flowers to the kilo, colours risottos in the villages below.
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