At four hundred square kilometres, the Parco Nazionale dell'Abruzzo is Italy's third largest national park and holds some of its wildest mountain land, providing a hunter-free haven for wolves, brown bears, chamois and a pair of royal eagles, along with some great walking. L'Aquila, at the foot of Gran Sasso mountain, and Sulmona just to its south, are the most visited of Abruzzo's historic towns. The hill villages around L'Aquila and those below the Gran Sasso, the Apennines' highest peak, are deeply rural places, where time can seem to have stopped in the fifteenth century.
