Indeed, as soon as I arrived there and parked my car in the spacious parking place in the “Rifugio Lagdei” (one of the many starting points for excursions), I was completely astonished. The park is located in the south of Parma, about 50-60km from it. The best way to reach it in my opinion is to take the highway of the “Cisa” (Highway A15 Parma-La Spezia) , but you can take a look for complete directions here.

this is the view you get on your arrival to Lagdei

a curious fountain made with a giant rock with a small lizard carved into the stone

On Lagdei there is a big wooden bridge that goes all around the perimeter of the starting point, which is really huge. Along the path there are various signs explaining the historical events that leads to the creation of this place. It is both relaxing and very interesting.

the wooden path

If you don’t mind a short walking, about 1h, you can climb up from Lagdei to the lake called “Lago Santo” (Holy Lake) which offers really a spectacular sight, just take a look at the picture below:

wonderful, isn’t it? another option, is to start from the point of Lagoni, and take a different path that leads you up to 1400m on sea level, until you reach another lake called “Lago Scuro” (Dark Lake). This one is longer, but offers more possibilities to explore several places in one trip.

this curious hole was in a big rock nearby the path

here it is, the Lago Scuro in all its splendour!

The latest 2 pictures below are taken from the starting point of Lagoni. The cool thing is that both Lagdei and Lagoni are easily reachable with car, even during winter, so you can start walking straight into the park.

a beautiful view of Lagoni

another picture of Lagoni

All in all, I really recommend to visit this natural park if you have the chance. It will be a travel to remember for sure! Ah, was about to forget: inside the park there are over 150km of cycling paths for mountain-bikes, all well-signaled. So if you like trekking, this is a very good place!

In the end we didn’t buy anything, however I want to share the good and the bad moments of that journey I did during the month of october, several years ago…

We departed from Bologna very early, our plan was to stop in a hotel (or cheap place) as soon as we passed the french border. But we didn’t take into account the usual insane italian traffic that makes driving a true nightmare… and also the weather wasn’t helping at all: raining all the time!

We also had a small car accident while passing on the “Freejus pass”, one of the tires got hit by something fallen from a truck we had a few meters before us! the tire of our Yaris was completely destroyed and we were unable to continue.

So after we substituted the normal tire with the emergency one, we had to stop in the small town of Bardonecchia to fix the problem. We had lost 2 hours of time this way!

Two hours we had to recoup in our travel plan.

At last we passed the border and we decided to stop nearby the medium-sized town of Chambery, where we found a very cheap motel.

Since it was quite late we didn’t find any place to eat, so we had to take a sort of bizarre “french sandwitch” that honestly wasn’t really attractive even if they didn’t taste too bad after all.

After such a troublesome start we didn’t know what was waiting for us the next day!

Hohenschwangau covered by snow

And I couldn’t leave without taking a look to the 3rd castle nearby, Linderhof. It was covered by snow too, and was closed to the public, however you could still access the outside, which is nice anyway even during winter (even if of course during summer is completely different with all the flowers, etc). It was cool, a strange quiet and at same time majesty was surrounding all the place, almost an intimidating atmosphere.

We explored it for a while, remembering how was different from the summer view, and we had a good time, a feeling of peace, relax.

Linderhof’s park during winter

During the last day of our short winter holiday, we decided to randomly explore Oberammergau surroundings, it’s one of the thing I like more. No predetermined goal, no time, just our instinct: we traveled by foot, following a strange white cross that was on a hill close to the village, and we passed through a wooden bridge…

…and lastly we spotted the cross, and discovered that every year the village people make a “passion play”, a really nice Christian tradition. You can read the whole history in the official site here: www.oberammergau.de

White Cross

Since we had still a few hours left before leaving, we took a short drive and started to walk into a nearby wood (of course was all snow-covered). Once again, there was a really weird atmosphere in it, of peace and mystery together, maybe also because the sun was fading and the darkness was slowly but constantly enveloping the landscape.

We stopped at one point where there was a small river, and we could hear a distant waterfall noise, or something like that. We were too much curious to find out what was hiding behind those woods, but it was really late and almost night, so we thought that was better to get back to the car.

We swore thought to come back there one day, to find out what marvelous nature’s masterpiece was hiding in that “magic wood” of the bavarian region…

a distant waterfall noise… what was hiding in that wood?

Anyway, probably we’re the only italians that had a winter holiday in Oberammergau, and not to ski! yes you read it well, we only had need to relax after the stress of the daily routine, and we found a nice environment-friendly holiday apartment, completely built with wood, warm and cozy. For only 35 eur / day, it was included also a sauna and bike rental (even if being winter we didn’t took advantage of it).

We arrived in the late afternoon, and we did a short walk in the town, since as you may know in winter gets dark early.

In the dusk light a curious figure attracted our attention: the vase-woman ! it was a very bizarre “sculpture” made entirely with vases, just in the middle of the town!

vasewoman, the new super hero!

The next day we decided to ignore the weather challenge (it had snown a lot during the night) to reach the Neuschwanstein’s castle, to see how it was during the winter (we had already the luck to admire it during summer). On the road to reach it, we found a very nice church in the plain before the castle that had a very particular atmosphere, you can see it in the picture below.

a small church in the winter landscape, with menacing cloudy sky behind…

At last we were arrived in front of the huge castle, that was magnificent even with all that snow and the cold (in Bavary can get very cold during winter!). Already from some distance the view was great, but we decided to leave the car and walk even more near.

Neuschwanstein during winter, like in a fairy-tale!

Unfortunately when we reached the Marienbrucke bridge, the perfect spot to take a picture of the castle, the sun was already going down so the light wasn’t really good to take photographs. Add to this that my digital camera isn’t exactly professional, and you can see the bad result in the picture below. I tried to fix it with Photoshop but unluckily that’s the best I could get

Neuschwanstein during winter, seen from the bridge of Marienbrucke

We started our trip a few km after the village of Castelluccio, as you can see from the pictures below those are still places very green and clean, with almost no pollution. The shelter on top of the mountain is one of the few buildings you can see in the whole valley!

a panoramic view of the mountain surroundings

We made that trip a few years ago, when the heat and humidity in Bologna was unbearable. We took the car and after around 1h of driving we reached Porretta, then Castelluccio and finally we left the car to take a walk up to the top of the mountain. The path isn’t particularly hard or difficult, even if you aren’t used to walk in the mountains.

and here it is, the shelter on the top of “Monte Cavallo”

When we were almost arrived it started to rain, the classic summer thunderstorm that comes all of a suddenly, so we had to run to reach the shelter on the top. When we finally saw it in the middle of the wood, we were relieved!

We spent several minutes under the shelter’s roof, watching the rain falling all around us. It was awesome, fascinating. It was both relaxing but at same time intimidating, showing the true nature’s wrath!

Then after around 30 minutes the thunderstorm was over, and we came back to our car, with still the memory of those beautiful places in our mind.