Parco Nazionale
Parco Nazionale in Sardinia
9 towns
Sardinia holds 9 Parco Nazionale sites inside our catalogue. They cluster in the Nuoro and Sassari provinces.
The three most recognised in our catalogue are La Maddalena, Oliena, and Atzara. 6 more towns carry the mark alongside them.
La Maddalena
Province: Sassari · 19 m
The only inhabited town of a sixty-island granite archipelago between Sardinia and Corsica, and the place Giuseppe Garibaldi chose to die.
Oliena
Province: Nuoro · 380 m
A Supramonte village at the foot of the massif's highest peak, source of Cannonau Nepente, base camp for Tiscali and the Lanaitto valley.
Atzara
Province: Nuoro · 553 m
A Mandrolisai wine village on the western Gennargentu, painted in the early twentieth century by Spanish costumbristas and the Sardinian Scuola di Atzara.
Aritzo
Province: Nuoro · 800 m
A Mandrolisai mountain village at 800 meters in chestnut and hazelnut forest, where snow once travelled out in straw and came back as lemon sorbet.
Dorgali
Province: Nuoro · 387 m
A Supramonte town at 387 meters, with a coastal frazione, a Nuragic village hidden in a sinkhole, and a limestone gorge cut through the massif to the south.
Fonni
Province: Nuoro · 1,000 m
The highest village in Sardinia at 1,000 meters on the Gennargentu, with ski lifts climbing above the town and the Madonna dei Martiri sanctuary at its edge.
Gavoi
Province: Nuoro · 777 m
A 777-meter Barbagia hilltop village above Lake Gusana with a Bandiera Arancione of the Touring Club, the country's most-attended summer literary festival (L'Isola delle Storie), and the PDO Fiore Sardo pecorino made here for at least three centuries.
Baunei
Province: Nuoro · 480 m
A village at 480 meters on the Monte Santo limestone ridge, its territory holding a national-monument beach and a trek regularly called Italy's hardest.
Orgosolo
Province: Nuoro · 620 m
A Barbagia village at 620 meters with over 150 political murals painted on its walls since the 1969 Pratobello revolt.
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.