Sentiero dell'Inglese

A week on foot through the wild east of the Aspromonte: the Sentiero dell'Inglese links seven stages from the ghost village of Pentedattilo to Staiti, following the route Edward Lear travelled in 1847 and threading the Greek-speaking villages where Calabria still speaks its ancient Greek.

Why it matters

The Sentiero dell'Inglese is a mountain route created in 1994 in Aspromonte National Park, following the 1847 journey of Edward Lear, the nineteenth-century English landscape painter and writer. Lear toured the province of Reggio Calabria in 1847, in the company of a friend and a donkey, and turned the journey into his illustrated Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, published in 1852. The regional tourism portal has made the route one of its headline itineraries, running from Pentedattilo in the comune of Melito Porto Salvo to Staiti, and the park presents it as a thematic trail of its official network, with a locally-run hospitality network — the Ospitalità Diffusa — that lets hikers sleep in the villages they pass through.

What to notice

The route's texture is what stays with you. Dense woods open onto clearings, with views from some ridges toward both the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas. Valleys are cut by fiumare, the stony torrent-beds characteristic of Calabria, and the stages stitch together the villages of Calabria Grecanica: Amendolea in the comune of Condofuri, Gallicianò and Bova, where the "Greci di Calabria" minority still speaks the ancient Greek of the peninsula. Abandoned settlements punctuate the walk, above all the starting village of Pentedattilo, its houses scattered beneath five-fingered pinnacles. Habitat changes quickly too — Mediterranean scrub and tall holm-oak woods, natural pine stands and beech forests higher up — reflecting the microclimates the portal attributes to the massif's position between two seas.

Context and history

The trail is a modern creation built on a romantic journey. Lear travelled in 1847, when foreign Grand Tour visitors still treated Calabria as barely charted country, and his illustrated journal fixed the image of the massif for British readers. In 1994 the park authority formalised the walking route through the park's territory as the Sentiero dell'Inglese, organised it into seven stages and paired it with the Ospitalità Diffusa, the diffuse hospitality system managed by the local communities themselves. The route now shares the mountain's literary identity with the Corrado Alvaro circuit around San Luca, which the regional portal presents alongside it. In 2021 the ground the trail crosses gained a further layer of recognition, when the Aspromonte became a UNESCO Global Geopark.