Cells cut into limestone above empty valleys: reserve a seven night hermitage walking week in the Majella
From $1,610 per person, two sharing a double room, seven nights between June and early October. The spread on this one is very wide, the widest we print: the same seven nights can be a high open massif you have to yourself, or a mountain shut by storm and heat with the walking cut back to the valley floor. Both are set out below.
Reserve one of these weeksSend the form whenever it suits: it never shuts. Someone here replies inside one working day, and no charge arises at this end.
One week, written out twice
One set of dates, one set of rooms, the same guides and the same $1,610. The variable is the place itself, which answers to nobody here. Both readings appear below because both are real.
At its best
The walk in is beech wood on an old track, then the trees stop and you are on white stone with nothing above you. A hermitage is built straight into an overhang: a masonry facade, a stair cut in the rock, a chapel the size of a bedroom, water running out of the wall into a stone basin. You can sit in the doorway and see forty kilometres of valley and not one moving vehicle. Higher, the massif is a bare rolling plateau of shattered limestone with sinkholes in it, and the long day crosses it to a summit that shows the sea on one side and the central chain on the other. Sheep bells, a shepherd hut roofed with stone slabs, and by seven you are eating lamb and pasta in a village of eight hundred people.
At its worst
Same seven nights, same rooms, same $1,610. Two things go wrong here and they go wrong hard. Heat: a block of high pressure in July or August puts the valley at thirty eight degrees and the plateau at thirty, with no shade anywhere on the stone, and the guide either starts at five in the morning or takes the high day off the plan. Storm: this massif builds cloud on most summer afternoons, and when it breaks it breaks with lightning on open rock, which is the one place nobody walks. Lose the plateau and you lose the reason people come here. What still stands: the hermitages sit in the beech at eight hundred to a thousand metres, shaded, cool and reachable on a bad day; the villages, the stone and the food are untouched by any of it; and the mountain is empty in either version of this week.
A single block of limestone in central Italy, roughly thirty miles by twenty, rising from valley farmland to just under two thousand eight hundred metres, with a summit plateau of bare rock and dry grass and holes in the ground where the water goes. The whole of it is a national park and it stays one of the emptier mountain areas in the country: on a weekday in September you can cross the high ground and pass four people. Beech forest covers the flanks to about eighteen hundred metres, thick and old, with wolf and bear in it that you will almost certainly never see. Below the forest the villages sit at seven or eight hundred metres, stone built, half emptied by emigration, a few hundred residents each.
Hermitages cut straight into the rock
Tall narrow view of a stone hermitage facade built under a rock overhang on a cliff
From about the twelfth century, and in some cases earlier, people went up into the gorges on the flanks of this massif and built cells under overhangs. Not chapels standing free on a slope: a facade of masonry closing off a natural shelter, a stair cut into the rock beside it, a room or two behind the wall, a spring channelled into a basin, and a drop below the doorway. Several are reachable on foot in an hour or two from a road head through beech, and one or two ask for a scramble on a fixed cable. They are unstaffed, unlocked and mostly silent. This week visits three of them on separate days, because the interest wears out if you do them together and because they sit on different sides of the mountain.
Costs held and costs left out
From $1,610 per person holds seven nights, two sharing a double room, in a village guest house with one night in a mountain refuge; breakfast daily and four evening meals; four guided days with a guide licensed for the region; vehicle transfers to the road heads, which are long and unavoidable here; and park access. Left out: getting to Italy and reaching the region, which you book yourself, because this office arranges no flights and no crossings and holds a contract with no carrier. Also left out: lunches, three dinners, drinks, the one museum charge in the valley, and personal equipment. No insurance is sold here and none is advised on. Billing comes from whichever firm runs that week, on its own paper and its own terms, and this end is settled with later.
Nights
7
From
$1,610 per person, two sharing
When it runs
June to early October
Spread between the two versions
Very wide
What the figure holds
Rooms for the nights stated, the guided days set out on this page, admissions belonging to those days, and whatever the running company charges for its own part.
What it leaves out
Reaching the country and leaving it again, any meal not listed above, anything personal, and anything agreed later.
Who invoices you
The company that runs the week, in its own name.
Asked before anybody commits
Which of the two weeks will I actually get?
We do not know. Nobody has a usable figure for how a July or September week on this massif turns out, and this office is not going to make one up to make the page more comfortable to read. That is why the spread here is marked very wide, and why the bad week above is written at the same length as the good one.
If the high day is dropped for storms, is anything refunded?
Normally not. The operating company sets those terms, and a day changed because of lightning on open rock is a safety decision rather than a failure to deliver, so it is replaced rather than repaid. You will be walking something else that day, lower and under trees. Read that company's terms before you commit, since they are the terms you are agreeing to, not ours.
Can you advise me on entry rules or vaccinations?
No. Visas, passports, vaccination, law and medicine: no opinion is offered here on any of the five. Those questions belong to people qualified to answer them and to the countries that set the rules. What this office can tell you is which days are long, how high the ground gets, and how far the nearest road is from where you will be standing.
Finish the sentence and a week gets reserved
Whatever the hour, what you send lands here and is read by a person, who replies inside one working day. Sending it binds you to nothing, and no sum is ever taken at this end.
