Parco Nazionale
Parco Nazionale in Basilicata
9 towns
Basilicata holds 9 Parco Nazionale sites inside our catalogue. They cluster in the Potenza and Matera provinces.
The three most recognised in our catalogue are Latronico, Lagonegro, and Sasso di Castalda. 6 more towns carry the mark alongside them.
Latronico
Province: Potenza · 888 m
A mountain town at 888 meters on the northern edge of the Pollino, with two prehistoric thermal springs at the Calda hamlet below.
Lagonegro
Province: Potenza · 666 m
A 666-meter town founded by Byzantine monks on a defensive promontory, split between a medieval castle village and a modern square below.
Sasso di Castalda
Province: Potenza · 949 m
A 949-meter village in the Lucanian Apennines whose emigrants produced the engineer who launched Apollo 11, now crossed by a 300-meter Tibetan footbridge.
Calvello
Province: Potenza · 730 m
A 730-meter ceramic town working clay since 1200, when Benedictines from Faenza brought the wheel south.
Rivello
Province: Potenza · 479 m
A 479-meter ridge above the Noce valley where Lombards and Byzantines lived side by side, holding Latin and Greek rites until the seventeenth century.
Rotonda
Province: Potenza · 626 m
The Pollino park's Lucanian gateway: a 3,171-resident borgo at 626m on the Basilicata/Calabria border, headquarters for the Parco Nazionale del Pollino, Italy's largest national park, with the Loricato pine forests immediately above town.
Valsinni
Province: Matera · 250 m
A 1,344-resident Lucanian borgo on a hilltop above the Sinni river, where a 16th-century Renaissance poet was murdered by her brothers in 1545, marked today by a Touring Club Bandiera Arancione and a place inside the Pollino park.
Viggiano
Province: Potenza · 975 m
A 975-meter Val d'Agri ridge town, home of the Black Madonna of Lucania and the Italian folk harp, on Europe's largest onshore oil field.
Terranova di Pollino
Province: Potenza · 926 m
At 926 meters on the Lucanian side of the Pollino, the gateway into Italy's largest national park, home of the Sarmento red potato.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Visso
Province: Macerata
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Goriano Sicoli
Province: L'Aquila
At 720 meters in the Subequana valley, a medieval village drawn by M.C. Escher in 1929 keeps a May ritual folklorists trace to Demeter.
Ugento
Province: Lecce
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Fontanellato
Province: Parma
A Parma-plain town built around the Rocca Sanvitale, the moated fortress at its center.
Pescina
Province: L'Aquila
A Marsica town at 735 meters, on the rim of the drained Fucino basin, that lost five thousand of six thousand people in a single morning in 1915.