Until just a few years ago, hiking was a necessity in the impoverished mountains of southern Italy. The rural roads joining hilltop villages to the coast-bound highways were often washed away by seasonal torrents and broken by neglect. Private automobiles were rare, at least by comparison to the more prosperous north.
In recent years, prospects in southern Italy have changed; little mom-and-pop olive groves have given way to large corporate farms, and everyone, it seems, has a recent-vintage car in which to tool around on the region's still-terrifying but better-maintained mountain roads. Now that the area is more easily accessible, outsiders have begun to discover southern Italy as a vacation spot, and they're been bringing their pastimes, like hiking, with them.
Though still far from crowded, the ancient footpaths of southern Italy's Maratea Coast, in constant use since the Neolithic era, now boast more Vibram-booted walkers than flock-shooing shepherds. Local hiking enthusiasts have made modest improvements on those paths, marking them with unobtrusive signs that point the way to the area's many natural attractions—limestone caves, stony beaches, gushing cliffside springs, and tall mountains among them.
The most difficult of the hikes near the Maratea coast is marked on signs and trail maps as the Percorso Monte Crivo. It leads from the canyon-hugging town of Maratea up into the granite and limestone formations of the Serra Cappallera. It begins at the trailhead near the town's famed seventy-foot-tall statue of Christ the Redeemer, with its arms fully extended to form the shape of a cross. My friend Renato Formisani, who bases his ocean-going sailboat Flora in Maratea's larger harbor, is fond of grumbling about the statue, which, even a die-hard believer might admit, doesn't quite fit into an otherwise stunning view of tall mountains tumbling into a crystalline sea. Renato is more bothered, though, by the fact that the statue faces inland. "Jesus ought to be looking out for us sailors," he says. "We need the protection more than the landlubbers."
That may be true today, but the Maratea coast's tall mountains are famed for their wildness, and the the people who once lived among them, who needed watching. In the Aeneid, Virgil tells us that it was here that Aeneas's helmsman Palinurus washed ashore after falling asleep on watch—and here that the local inhabitants promptly butchered the unfortunate stranger. In more recent years, the cave-riddled hills served as hiding places for bandits, Mafiosi, and antifascist guerrillas. The odds of being robbed or injured here were solid enough that for many years few outsiders came to the region—which was just fine by the locals, who kept to their vineyards and gardens and worked the fertile sea pretty much unnoticed.
The Percorso Monte Crivo winds along a cart road until it reaches a broad limestone shelf called the Piedi la Scala, where you'll find a small rest area sporting a fountain of delicious spring water. The path climbs from there to the top of 3,858-foot (1,176 m) Monte Crivo, following streams cut into forested canyons. The trail is steep, but the views it affords are well worth the effort. At its higher elevations, too, the path is overgrown with fennel, thyme, and sage, stalks of which brush up against your pant legs to give you the scent of a good marinara sauce, an improvement over the odor of the usual sweating mountaineer. The Monte Crivo trail is only 2.5 miles (4.1 km) long from start to finish, but it's difficult. Plan on two hours to make the top, and another two or three to descend.
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An easier trail of about the same distance as the Percorso Monte Crivo begins south of the Marina di Maratea near Castrocucco Beach. Here, the ruins of a Norman castle overlook a small rocky island into which the sea has carved a series of deep grottos. The trail climbs to just above 1,300 feet (400 m) above sea level along the Vallone Arenara ("sandy vale"), ending near the hills dotted with olive groves above the hamlet of Massa. From there, you can descend along a narrow auto road to Maratea, or cross to the Percorso Monte Crivo due north. Again, from Maratea, plan on about three hours each way.
A third trail, known locally as the Malvello, runs roughly midway between Maratea and the mountaintop village of Trecchina. The trail is a little more than 5.5 miles (9 km) long and takes 4-5 hours. The Malvello trail follows a broad coastal plane below Monte Coccovello, a steep, 4,941-foot (1,505 m) rise that affords a view of Lagonegro, the village where, legend has it, the smiling woman who sat for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa lived out her last years. Paths to the mountaintop are unsigned but easy to follow. A marked trail leads to the tiny cliffside village of Cersuta, then continues along a rocky beach that commands a sweeping view of the Gulf of Policastro. A few private campsites have been set up along this beach, and, if you're inclined to rough it, just pitch a tent there and wait for someone to come along to collect the fee, which runs to about 5,000 lire, or under $2.50, a night.
Keep your eyes open, too, for wolves. Maratea's paths connect to other ancient roads that lead north and south to two of Italy's least-visited national parks: the Parco Nazionale del Cilento e Vallo Diano and the Parco Nazionale del Pollino. Both embrace some of the tallest peaks in the southern Apennines and large populations of wildlife—including Canis lupus, which has disappeared from most other parts of western Europe.
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