Travelcast Piceno - Audio & Video Guide per la Provincia di Ascoli Piceno

The National Park of the Sybilline Mountains was established in 1993. Its territory is comprised of Mount Vettore,  which reaches 2476 meters, and Mount Sibilla, for which the mountain chain is named.
The park is subdivided into four areas that reflect the varying characteristics of its territories. Each area conveys a different feeling. Near Macerata, there are flowered slopes that border the Fiastrone river and the Lago di Fiastra.  The historic area, along the Valle del Nera, contains the small village of Visso, which has founded before Rome. The sacred area on the shoulder of Mount Vettore comprises the town of Norcia and the plains of Castelluccio.  The so-called magical area is in the province of Ascoli Piceno, stretching from Arquata to Amandola, and is the one in which the legends of the Lago di Pilato and of the Sybil coexist.

During the Middle Ages, the ascent to Lago di Pilato was strictly regulated in order to prevent wizards and sorcerers from reaching the mirrored waters where they could perform magic rites to invoke the dead.  It is said that Cecco d’Ascoli, the poet, astrologer and contemporary of Dante Alighieri, had performed rites near the lake, before becoming condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake in Florence.
While the legend of the lake had echoes at a national level, the legend of the Sybill was fundamental to the European tradition.
In 1420, a knight in the court of the king of France, Antoine de la Sale, reached Montemonaco and, from there, left for the peak of Mount Sibilla. The knight may have been influenced by the novel “Il Guerrin Meschino” that the writer Andrea da Barberino  had published several years earlier.
Guerrin Meschino was a crusader who never knew his parents. Returning to Italy, he was told of the sybil’s power to reveal the past and to foretell the future. This is why he traveled to the grotto. From the entrance, he descended deep into the mountain. The sybil kept him for one year, during which time she wanted to corrupt the youth, but he decided to return to the surface. Once on the outside, he went to Rome and reached the Pope to ask forgiveness of his sins.
The “appennine sybil” was probably derived from the “cumana sybil” in the christianized version of the myth. After predicting the birth of Christ, she supposedly found refuge in the depths of the mountain.
Recent study advances the connection between the sybil and a matriarchal society of Celtic origin which had resisted the spread of Christianity in this mountain region.
Visible in this grotto, visited many times by artists, scholars and lovers, are coats of arms inscribed by medieval knights.
It is not a coincidence, therefore, that influenced by this story, German and Anglosaxon areas developed the legend of Tannhauser and of Venusberg,  which served as subject matter for the great artists Richard Wagner and Aubrey Beardsley.

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