Overview
Framed by the high peaks of the mountains that surround it, the village of Sant'Eufemia a Maiella will allow you to experience a unique holiday in the name of nature, giving you the opportunity to experience the much desired "slow life".
The village, whose origins date back to the 14th century as a cluster of pastoral houses, was a fiefdom of the Colonna family and retained a typical pastoral lifestyle until the 1900s. Your stay will make you feel suspended between today's contemporary frenzy and a time of almost forgotten values, between innovation and tradition.
Living Sant'Eufemia a Maiella is this and much more. The artistic symbol of the village is undoubtedly the Church of San Bartolomeo, dating back to the 15th century. A small jewel in neo-Romanesque style with a seventeenth-century wooden tabernacle built by the Capuchin friars and decorated with particular twisted columns and golden images of angels and the town's patron saints.
Just outside the village on the highest mountain hill in the Orta Valley, you will find the hamlet of Sant'Eufemia a Maiella declared an "Italian Wonder". We are talking about the village of Roccacaramanico, counted among the 500 Italian wonders identified among landscape, cultural and historical sites of particular value and interest.
The village offers you a glimpse of ancient life, both through its characteristic and intricate streets, and through the Marcello de Giovanni Ethnographic Museum which you will find right at its entrance. It takes care of the representation, dissemination and reconstruction of the way of being and operating of the homo laborans of the Maiella-Morrone Mountain area, showing objects, tools and machines from the agricultural, artisanal and forestry-pastoral history of these very rich territories.
Between the villages of Sant'Eufemia and that of Roccacaramanico, on your walk immersed in the nature of the Maiella, you will find the Lama Bianca Nature Reserve, a protected natural area that covers an area of 1,300 hectares, bordering the Valle dell'Orfento Nature Reserve. The Reserve is populated by specimens of the Apennine wolf, roe deer, Abruzzo chamois and Marsican brown bear and there are more than one hundred species of birds. The Reserve is also rich in beech and mountain pine forests and offers the possibility of admiring the Gentian and the Edelweiss of the Apennines above 2000 metres.
To complete your holiday in the heart of Abruzzo, all you have to do is taste the local cuisine. We suggest a small menu consisting of pizza and orapi, pappardelle with wild boar sauce and callara sheep.