The roof of the Apennines. Monte Corno, highest of a group of summits, is 2,914 m. On an easy gradient you climb from Aquila to Assergi and Fonte Cerreto, the cable-car station. A 12-minute ride deposits you at an Arctic settlement: hotel, restaurant, snackbar, observatory, tiny black-and-white chapel, husky dogs and sleigh-rides. You can reach the same spot on a well-shod road (17 bis/6) from Assergi. Walk for ten minutes along the uphill trail to Monte Corno and before you have reached the first refuge hut you are surrounded by edelweiss. (It is illegal to dig them up by the roots. Picking them could be unlawful, too: this depends upon local by-laws – enquire first rather then suffer embarrassment; a precaution which holds good for wild flowers all over Italy.) Stroll the other way, down a slope, and you are on the Campo Imperatore, in winter a snowy table cloth and in summer a quaking bog of Alpine flora. In Mussolini’s time this was Rome’s winter playground. Mussolini himself was here, a prisoner after the 1943 coup. The Germans rescued him in a daring airborne snatch. (Some visitors ask to be given his room at the Campo Imperatore hotel, but the proprietor has forgotten which it was.) The ascent of Monte Corno from this side is not for amateurs. Slightly easier is the chairlift-assisted climb from Pietracamela on the other side of the massif. In winter the Gran Sasso is busy, though winter sports facilities are still rudimentary by Alpine standards. In summer everything is strangely neglected and peaceful.