Everyone knows that Italy is a boot. Many people know that the boot has a heel – the rocky, sunburnt region of Puglia. Perhaps a few know that the heel has a spur – the Gargano Peninsula. Yet virtually no one knows that the Gargano hides a magical woodland – the Foresta Umbra – a national park and treasure. And one of a dozen or more Italian parklands that are practically unvisited by foreign tourists.
Puglia is studded with eerie and beautiful castles, allegedly possessed of occult properties
My intention is to do a walking tour of the Gargano, kindly organised by a British travel company, who will ferry my luggage from hotel to hotel, and provide me with maps and picnics – so all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, with handy compass points on a detailed guide, to make sure I don’t fall in the Adriatic.
The sacred Foresta lies ahead of me, right now I am at the tip of the spur that is Gargano. A honeyed little town called Vieste. It is almost deserted; the sun shines, lizards skitter, a girl sighs happily and orders another Aperol. She is alone but she seems garrulously happy to talk. I ask her if Vieste is always like this, she laughs and says ‘No. In July or August? Terrible. Do not come then. But, for the rest of the year,’ she gestures expansively, and grins. ‘Perfetto.’
Vieste is indeed – out of high season – perfetto. Everywhere I turn, shaded limestone lanes are hung with perfumed washing, like a miniature Naples, minus the Camorra. The lanes lead to plunging cliffs, green with pines and thorny cacti, and at the bottom of many of these precipitous drops you will find a trabuccho, a medieval contraption for catching fish.
But that is typical of Gargano, it has been doing things in its own whimsical ways since at least the 12th century days of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and ‘Stupor Mundi’. The ‘wonder of the world’ studded Puglia with eerie and beautiful castles, allegedly possessed of occult properties – and one of them sits atop Vieste.
Beneath the crumbling citadel you will find a dozen fish restaurants hidden down snickets or set into cliffs – the more basic are often the best. They nearly all have stupor mundi views and do great orecchiette (local ear-shaped pasta) plus octopus, tuna, squid and dewy cold bottles of the local white: verdeca. Mmm.
After my initial day of vaguely wandering around decorous Vieste, I am ready for my first big hike. Suited and booted. A handy cab driver picks me up, he has my bags and he will ferry them on to the next hotel, but he drops me long before then in a sunny glade – with my binos, guidebook, water bottle, and a heady spirit of mild adventure. And off I set: deep into the primordial forest.
How to describe the Foresta Umbra? It is English yet Italian, it is mighty yet intricate. It is the Forest of Dean mingled with the ents of Tolkien, yet in the southlands. It is also a vast green woodland where oaks and pines grow to spectacular heights because of the unusual topography: southern latitudes with northern altitudes allied with nourishing warm rains. It is genuinely strange – at any one moment you could be in the Chilterns – but then you step into a shaft of burning sun, piercing the richly dark canopy (the name foresta umbra means shadowy forest), and you see the sizzling and turquoise Adriatic a few kilometres away.
Outside very high season the majestic woodland – as with Vieste – is deserted. I walk for seven hours from a lonely spring to a lonelier rifugio (great cakes, home-made lemon marmalade, welcome Peroni beer) and in all that time I see more roe deer (three) than other humans (two). There are rumours of wild cats and wolves; the forest floor is speckled with orchids – one of the highest concentrations in Europe.
This splendid hike ends at a recently refurbed lodge, the Elda hotel. Think comfortable, wooden, Alpine and immersed in the surrounding greenery, where girls with fantastically broken English serve me fine wild boar pasta, cold beer, gorgeous olive paste madeleines, and – as is often the case in Italian hotels – decidedly mediocre breakfast. Save room for supper at the next stop instead.
But where is that next stop? The following morning I potter happily around the local lakelets, then, the day after that, I steel myself for my culminating hike: out of the forest and through magnificently empty countryside, ridged with drystone walls, like the Yorkshire Dales during a ludicrously pleasant summer. Then I see my destination on top of the next hill crest.
It’s called Monte Sant’Angelo – it’s a famous Catholic shrine once ‘inhabited by the Archangel Michael’ – and all day on my trek I’ve been mentally mocking it (‘Where did the Archangel shop? Did he pay for parking?’) but then, as I ascend the final steeps and approach the shrine, my incredulity falls away.
The Shrine of Mont Sant’Angelo is astonishing. You enter via an elegantly knackered neo-classical white portico, and you go down and down, and down – passed rock and icons – through the Baroque and the Renaissance and the Angevins and the Normans and the Byzantines and the Lombards, all the way to the late Romans. You pass the place where St Francis of Assisi came to pray because it was already famous in his time; you pass walls where 7th century Anglo-Saxon priests left graffiti in runic.
Finally you come to a halt in a sombre, candlelit cave where everyone is attending a service, and it is all quite overwhelming. Despite my agnostic mockery I end up taking mass.
After Monte Sant’Angelo everything is downhill, but in a nice way. Shrived and contented I descend the Gargano hills to the blue Adriatic and a languidly charming hotel in the little town of Mattinata. The food is superb (spaghetti in oyster sauce), the view across the bay even better. What’s more, I’ve earned every calorie, I’ve got fit, tanned and (sort of) trim, and I’ve spiritually communed with one of Europe’s great, forgotten forests. I’ve also learned that so much of wild Italy is yet to be explored – it has umpteen national parks like this. Not bad for the forgotten spur of an old boot-heel.
Inntravel (inntravel.co.uk 01653 617000) offers a one week self-guided walking holiday on Puglia’s Gargano Peninsula from £1,070pp based on 2 sharing, including 7 nights’ B&B in four-star hotels, 4 dinners, 1 picnic, luggage transfers, route notes and maps and GPS navigation. Start any day of the week. Available from 9 April to 30 June and 1 September to 31 October.
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