The threshold between two worlds

Seashore plants growing thirty kilometres inland, four truffle genotypes out of the seven in Europe: the Sangro valley is an ark.

The story

The Sangro valley matters for biogeography: it forms a threshold between the Mediterranean region and the Euro-Siberian one. Particular plant communities reassert the Mediterranean character of the region, such as the wide garrigues of prickly juniper and mastic.

The prickly juniper

The flora of greatest biogeographical interest is the scrub of prickly juniper, a shrub that here even reaches the size of a tree. These juniper thickets are found along the Rio Secco stream and on the Guarenna hills above Casoli: the prickly juniper grows by preference on the scaly clays.

Seashore plants inland

These clays are home to several halophytic or salt-tolerant plants that normally grow by the sea. How can plants so bound to salt coastal habitats have reached so far inland? They are ancient forms of vegetation, going back six million years to the drying out of the Mare Nostrum. That event helped spread plants adapted to salt soils; later, with deep tectonic and climatic change, these plants were left stranded either by the sea or on the clay soils of the interior.

A Noah's Ark

The Sangro valley acted as a refuge for plants during the cold periods of the Quaternary, in particular the Würm, which ended about 15,000 years ago. Holly, bay laurel, Griolet's sedge, the juniper woods and the holm-oak woods growing alongside the silver fir, as at Borrello and Rosello, are all evidence of this. Here the silver fir shows close genetic ties with those of southern Italy, while the firs beyond the Sangro — those of the Gran Sasso and the Monti della Laga — have more in common with those of the Alps.

Further confirmation comes from the world of truffles, bound to forest trees by a mycorrhizal symbiosis: of the seven genotypes present in Europe, four have been identified in the middle Sangro, between Quadri, Borrello, Rosello, Pizzoferrato, Gamberale and Montenerodomo. The greater genetic diversity suggests that this area served as a kind of Noah's Ark of the truffle.

In short, the Sangro valley is a chosen place where plant species of Mediterranean, European and Asian origin come together. The concentration of particularly rare plants and animals, framed by evocative settings, makes these places known throughout Europe: that is why Abruzzo is spoken of as the “Green Region of Europe”.

The animals

The most emblematic animals of Abruzzo are the Marsican brown bear, a peaceful wandering hermit, the shy Abruzzo chamois and the unbowed Apennine wolf, whose fate began to change in the 1970s after centuries of persecution. Recently there have been new sightings of the elusive lynx. Red deer and roe deer are by now widespread in the area, and the wild boar no less so.

There are many birds too, headed by the majestic golden eagle, with the buzzard and the kestrel, the peregrine and the lanner falcon, rock partridges, choughs and woodpeckers of several kinds, among which the wallcreeper stands out, an elegant bird like a brightly coloured butterfly. In the Aventino valley the Riccioli snake deserves a mention, a rare and harmless snake not known anywhere else in Abruzzo.