Let’s discover the town of Saracena in Calabria; located in the Garga valley. It boasts very ancient origins, even dating back to the early Bronze Age.

Saracena is a Calabrian town, located in the northern part of the province of Cosenza, which boasts ancient origins. Careful archaeological work has in fact made it possible to trace evidence of the late Eneolithic and early Bronze Age in the Garga Valley. Later it was the enotria city of Sextio and became part of the Bruzia Confederation, in pre-Roman and Roman times. During the barbarian invasions, the city became ‘La Saracina’, presumably under Saracen rule, at the time of the arrival of the Arabs in Val di Crati.

There is no direct evidence of the presence of the Saracens, but the town has a historic center with many elements reminiscent of an Islamic urban plan. The new town was born around a castle and is surrounded by walls with four doors (Vaglio, Scarano, Nova, San Pietro), oriented according to the cardinal points. We have first news of this castle in a document of 1072 which speaks of a meeting between Roberto il Guiscardo and his rebel nephew Abelardo. Piano di Novacco and the Piani di Masistro represent the gateway to the southern area of ​​the Pollino National Park, a natural habitat for the hooked truffle.

This area, also known as Orsomarso, is made up of hectares of beech forest, sometimes completely wild, which occasionally reveals clearings and landscapes of extraordinary beauty. Straddling the two seas, the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian, the more challenging slopes give way to flat expanses, offering access to old and abandoned railway tracks or flowing along winding valleys immersed in a wood. The forest, rich in mushrooms and hooked truffles, shows the signs of a living and flourishing nature.

Encounters with roe deer, once very rare, are now frequent. The Novacco plain reveals itself in its breadth with an extraordinary glance in every season, from the most dazzling white snow to the bright summer green, from the red of the beech forest in autumn to the most exciting polychromy of late spring. Behind Novacco, the gable of Scifarello, rich in spring water, and the plateau of the same name rise, leading to the Piano di Caramolo in an avenue of strawberries and berries. We then climb to the summit of Monte Caramolo, an exclusive terrace overlooking the two seas. The two karst basins of Masistro (Piano di Mezzo and Piano Grande) are of great visual power, whether they are visited by walking along the bottom, or by observing them from above, going up the belt of gentle hills that surrounds them and overlooking the Piano of Campotenese and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

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