Raganello Canyons, Pollino National Park, Italy

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The Pollino National Park (Italian: Parco nazionale del Pollino) is a national park in Basilicata and Calabria, southern Italy. Comprised within the provinces of Cosenza, Matera and Potenza, with its 1,820 square kilometres it is the largest natural park in the country. It takes its name from the Pollino Massif (highest peak 2,267 m). The park's symbol is the Bosnian pine, which here has one of its last remaining growing areas in Italy.

The Raganello Canyon (Gole del Raganello) is a territory that ends at the Ponte del Diavolo in Civita. A unique show of the nature, charming and impressive, made the sheer walls of rock for over 600 metres (the wall of the Timpa of the Diavolo facing the Village of Civita is high 614 metres) with the water course and that invites to "Walk" inside the close walls made of meanders and small whirlpools of geological formation, a characteristic of this sector of Apennines making this a very unique landscape. A landscape that must be proposed to the UNESCO as a world heritage of humanity. Man has tried to win the inaccessibility of this places with a series of masterpieces of engineering construction considering the time of the works. First of all the construction of the bridge d'Ilice (which is currently still in ruin state which deserves to be rebuilt) that allowed to cross the canyon at the closer and lower point of the gorge (height of the bridge from the surface of the water is only 28 metres) to put in communication the two neighbouring territories but also the distant towns of Civita with Alessandria del Carretto or San Paolo Albanese. Secondly the Ponte del Diavolo (Devil's Bridge), a masterpiece of local craftsmen, today completely newly remodelled, following the collapse of 1998, which allowed the communication with the Alto Jonio Cosentino and the Piana of Sibari.

The Village of Civita

It was founded in the 15th century by Albanian refugees from the Ottoman invasion. The Civitesi are part of an ethnic minority (Arbëreshë) officially recognized by the Italian laws.