The whisper, sharp with excitement, cuts through the silence: “It’s a bear.” One of our group is pointing to a hillside in the distance, where beech trees tumble down into a valley veiled in drizzle. There’s a hushed flurry of movement as the rest of us scramble for binoculars to bring the blur of brown into focus.
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I find the figure in the lens. Brown fur. Four legs. Antlers. “It’s a stag”, says Filippo Castellucci, our nature guide, with the same easy smile he’s worn since we arrived in Italy’s Central Apennines. He’d known it wasn’t a bear we’d spotted. But here among the mountains where he was raised, disappointment is a stranger to Filippo.
“It’s not always about finding wildlife,” he tells me. “It’s the element of unpredictability that makes these experiences so beautiful.”
As if to soften the blow of our false sighting, a brilliant rainbow pierces the darkening sky, plunging into the heart of the valley. We linger a little while longer, spellbound, as daylight slips away. The only sounds are the soft patter of rainfall and the distant clinking of bells carried by horses roaming freely across valley floor. Then the evening chill defeats us, and we turn for the warmth of our mountain cabin.
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Finding Marsican brown bears
The Apennines are a rugged chain of mountains stretching down the spine of Italy, with deep forests roamed by wolves and golden eagles that soar above frost-capped peaks. The Central Apennines are also home to the world’s only population of Marsican brown bears, a Critically Endangered species now numbering between just 60 and 90 individuals.
I’m on the trail of these rare bears on a six-day walking tour with Exodus Adventure Travels, whose partnership with local NGO Rewilding Apennines offers visitors an opportunity to learn about the essential work that’s underway to keep them protected.
Rewilding the Apennines
In conservation, rewilding is a progressive approach to restoring ecosystems by creating the conditions for self-sustaining natural processes to flourish and resume their vital work in repairing degraded landscapes. In other words, rewilding is about letting nature do its thing to get everything back on track. Sometimes this might mean reintroducing keystone species, such as apex predators who play a critical role in rebalancing food chains and restoring natural ecological balance.
But here in the mountains of central Italy, where bears and wolves have always clung to a foothold, rewilding efforts focus on improving habitat connectivity. By linking different protected areas through so-called ‘coexistence corridors’, conservationists at Rewilding Apennines are aiming to give wildlife populations the freedom to move safely across the landscape, expand their territory and, it’s hoped, boost their numbers.
The emphasis on ‘coexistence’ offers an insight into the challenges facing rewilding in this area, as Valerio Reale, enterprise manager at Rewilding Apennines, explains.
“Italy is a thin strip of land where everything is entangled – people, traditions, nature. Here in the Central Apennines, you have winemakers and shepherds living alongside wolves and bears.” Valerio tells us that rewilding in Italy must be about keeping these traditions – and the country’s food and farming culture – alive in a wilder world.
Unlike countries such as Scotland, where vast estates owned by a few families have made rewilding relatively straightforward to implement through top-down agreements, Italy’s countryside is a densely woven patchwork of smallholder farms, each often just a few hectares in size, passed down through the generations. This makes consensus harder to achieve, but it also opens the door to a richer, more collaborative model of rewilding that grows from within rural communities.
Success therefore hinges on conservation groups such as Rewilding Apennines earning the trust of local farmers and convincing them that human-wildlife coexistence can support, rather than threaten, their ways of life. There has been a long history of conflict between predators and farmers in the region, but attitudes are shifting, according to Valerio.
“We have to stop fuelling this story that bears and wolves are the main challenges facing farmers today,” he says. “You’ll find that good farmers, those who truly support biodiversity, have no issues with predators. They understand their role in the ecosystem.” In fact, Valerio argues, coexistence with wildlife could enrich traditional farming, not undermine it.
Working with farmers
We stop for lunch one afternoon in Bosco della Selva, a woodland area managed by Rewilding Apennines. As we feast on a banquet of tangy local cheeses, wild greens and homemade chutneys, Valerio points to studies that have shown how the presence of wild animals can influence the flavour of artisanal produce.
He explains how Rewilding Apennines partners with local farmers, foragers and artisans to ensure they share in the benefits brought by wildlife tourism. Such collaborations bring an economic boost to rural communities, while tourists are able to enjoy tasty food produced from the land. This, says Valerio, is rewilding the Italian way.
Creating opportunities for locals is only part of what coexistence means here in the Apennines. In a landscape prowled by wild bears, it’s also important that people and predators are kept apart.
There are no reported cases of Marsican brown bears, typically shyer and less aggressive than their larger cousins, attacking humans. But historically they’ve been a nuisance for farmers and residents in the Apennines’ medieval mountain towns. In one headline-grabbing case from 2021, a bear broke into a village bakery and ate all the biscuits.
Rewilding Apennines works with local administrations and individuals to keep bears out of towns by introducing proactive ‘bear-smart’ measures, such as electric fencing around livestock and bear-proof bins. Education is equally important: teaching habits such as removing fruit when it falls on the ground can make a big difference if a community pulls together.
But despite the success of these bear-smart initiatives, human activity still poses dangers to the region’s bears, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Threats to Marsican brown bears
On our first day in the Apennines, we were joined by Matteo Marcelli, a local farmer working with Rewilding Apennines to adopt more sustainable grazing practices, as he guided his herd of horses through the mountains to higher summer pastures. We climbed through beech forests and across wildflower meadows bursting with yellows and violets, the fragrant whispers of wild thyme and sage drifting on the breeze.
Over lunch at Matteo’s cabin on the summit, against a perfect frame of rural mountain life, we learned the tragic news that just the day before two Marsican bear cubs had drowned in a reservoir at an abandoned ski resort.
The cubs’ deaths were a huge blow to the Rewilding Apennines team, whose appeals to the municipality for the reservoir to be made safe had been ignored for years. Seated on a bench outside Matteo’s cabin, Valerio’s eyes brimmed with tears.
“You can engage the community and have all of these initiatives, but when this happens… what can you do?” He told us of other recent tragedies, including a bear that had been shot dead after wandering on to private land in 2023. That same year, the bakery-heist bear was hit and killed by a car on a mountain road. Could these events work as catalysts for real change, one of our company asked.
“There is always a reaction in the community,” said Valerio. “But now there are simply too many events like these. It’s an indication of how long and bumpy the road to coexistence is.”
Tragedies such as these are a reminder of why the work Rewilding Apennines is doing is so urgently needed. But Valerio has hope.
“Tourism will play a big part in this story,” he says. “We want more trips like these, trips reorientated towards important issues. Tourism helps us reach out to a different audience, to connect with people and show them what’s at stake.”
Partnering with sustainability-focused tour operators is making a measurable difference on the ground too. For every guest who travels with Exodus, 100m² of land is rewilded in the Italian Apennines, a commitment that has seen the rewilding of more than 650ha since 2022.
What’s more, all profits from Exodus’s Walks and Wildlife tour in the Italian Apennines go towards Rewilding Europe’s important work. These contributions not only support habitat recovery and help Rewilding Europe scale up its bear-smart initiatives in the coexistence corridors, but they also make visitors participants, not just spectators, in the region’s conservation story.
The future of the brown bears
Back on the trail on our penultimate day, we’re still waiting for our first glimpse of a bear. But there are signs of its presence all around: a wooden post scored with deep claw marks, a tuft of coarse brown hair snagged on a barb.
The latter is a small but important find – Filippo explains that this sample will feed into the ongoing genetic census of the Marsican brown bear. Citing the success of the coexistence corridors, Filippo is hopeful that the new data, due to be published next year, will show that the region’s bear population has grown since the last census more than 10 years ago.
“We know that one of the corridors, the one connecting the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park with the Maiella National Park, has been used by the bears to disperse,” he says. “Now there’s a stable presence of bears in the Maiella area.” He hopes that other corridors will help the Marsican bears in expanding their range and establishing themselves in more protected areas across Central Italy.
We rise before dawn the following morning. Wrapping our extra layers tightly around us, we follow Filippo from our mountain cabin to a vantage point looking across the valley. Ahead loom the peaks of the Monti Marsicani, the mountain range that gave its name to the Marsican bears that have so far eluded us. We wait in silence.
Filippo raises a hand and points across the valley. At first, we see nothing. Then, from the shadows of the forest, a lone wolf emerges. He climbs high above the treeline and pauses on a high ridge, his lithe frame cutting a sharp silhouette against the pale sky.
It’s our second wolf sighting of the trip: on the first morning, we’d seen two glide through a mist-pooled meadow, hardly 30m away. Frozen in place, we watch the wolf survey his mountain home. Then he slips away behind the curve of the ridge, and the landscape is empty once more.
Another 30 minutes pass. The cold has thinned our group – some have returned to the warmth of the cabin. The rest of us know our chances of glimpsing a Marsican bear are fading fast. But something else holds us here now. Caught in the spell of the mountains’ stillness, surrounded by sweeping wilderness, we feel lucky just to be present, to be standing for a while in the bear’s wild world.
So, when Filippo smiles and gestures that it’s time to move on, we’re not disappointed. A sighting would have been an extraordinary gift. But simply spending time here in the Apennines leaves a lasting impression.
