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Know the valley Casentino, Arezzo, Italy

The Casentino, season by season

A valley that changes its mind four times a year.

The valley is small, and it is also vertical: from the Arno at three hundred metres to the Apennine crest at over fifteen hundred. That is the whole trick of the Casentino seasons. In a single day you can drive out of a warm spring afternoon into a wood that has not noticed spring yet, and in October you can watch the same forest turn colour twice, three weeks apart, at two different heights. Here is what each season is actually for.

Spring

The valley wakes from the bottom up. While the plain along the Arno is already green, the beech on the Pratomagno is still bare, and that gap of three or four weeks is the point: half an hour of driving takes you out of one season and into another.

This is the season of the low walks, along the river and on the old mule tracks between the castles, before the grass grows back over them. Wild orchids on the limestone, the woods loud and busy, the passes just reopened. The sagre restart cautiously, with cherries and the first village feasts, and the Easter and May processions fill churches that stay shut for most of the year.

Bring boots, and do not believe a mountain forecast made three days out.

Nothing in the calendar for this stretch of the year just yet. The valley announces late - try the whole-valley agenda.

Summer On now

June to August is when the valley is busiest and, if you go up, coolest. Thirty degrees in Arezzo is a different number under the firs at Camaldoli, which is why Florentines have been coming up here to get away from the heat for centuries.

Everything happens at once now. Concerts in cloisters and castle courtyards, the big sagre with their long paper-covered tables, night walks, fireflies, open-air films in villages of two hundred people. The refuges on the Pratomagno ridge are open, and the evening from up there, with the Casentino on one side and the Valdarno on the other, is the best free thing in the province.

August is when Italy takes its holiday: fuller villages, stranger shop hours, and a queue at the sagra by eight. Arrive at seven instead.

The whole calendar

Autumn

The best season, and it is not close.

From the middle of September the forest turns, beech to copper and larch to gold, and for a fortnight or so around mid-October the Foreste Casentinesi are one of the great walks in Italy. At dusk in September, high up, you can hear the red deer roaring at each other across the valleys. Here they call it il bramito, and it is not a sound you forget.

Then the chestnuts. Raggiolo and the villages around it lived on them for centuries, and the autumn sagre are built on chestnut flour: castagnaccio, necci, sweet polenta, flour still ground between stones in mills you can walk into. Porcini come up after the rain. The good weekends are the Sundays of October, so go early: small villages have small car parks.

The whole calendar

Winter

Quiet, and honest about it. The high roads take snow, the hill villages take fog, and the valley goes back to the people who live in it.

December is the exception. Nearly every village puts up a presepe, and the bigger ones run a Christmas market on the first weekends of the month. The monasteries are at their most themselves now, cold and silent, snow on the firs and nobody in the car park. And the kitchen turns serious: scottiglia, ribollita, bollito, chestnuts roasted over the fire.

Check the opening hours before you drive anywhere. Half the valley closes in January, and the buses thin out with it.

The whole calendar

The Arno is born up here, on Monte Falterona, and leaves the valley near Subbiano. The Casentino gets Florence’s river first, and then gives it away.

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