You step into a harness, clip onto a steel cable strung from one ridge to the other, and go: since 2007 the Volo dell'Angelo has linked Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa at roughly 120 km/h, with 400 metres of air under your feet. It lasts a little over a minute and it is no generic thrill ride, because the landscape it crosses is the Dolomiti Lucane: sandstone spires pushed up and then carved by weather over fifteen million years, related to the real Dolomites by shape alone. Castelmezzano is wedged in among them, 685 people at 750 metres, houses leaning on the rock and rock pushing into the houses.
What to see
The spires carry names out of a farmers' bestiary: the Golden Eagle, the Great Mother, the Anvil. The highest summit of the group is Monte Caperino at 1,455 metres, but the set piece is the wall of the Murge di Castelmezzano, which closes off the village. Inside the village a Norman stairway cut into the rock climbs to the castle lookout: this was the Castrum Medianum, the “middle castle” between the neighbouring strongholds, and the town takes its name from it. At the top there is little more than fragments of wall and a view that explains on its own why people fleeing Saracen raids in the 10th century picked this particular spur.
The mother church of Santa Maria dell'Olmo is thought to have been founded in the early 13th century: the earthquake of 1857 damaged it, the archpriest Michele Arcangelo Volini had the nave widened in 1870, and the marble altars arrived at the start of the 20th century, paid for by emigrants from Castelmezzano living in the United States. The oldest bell was cast in 1666. A short walk away, the chapel of the Santo Sepolcro, possibly Byzantine in plan, keeps the wooden statue of the Madonna dell'Ascensione, tied to the tale of two fishermen said to have carried her up here from the sea. Between the two villages runs the Percorso delle Sette Pietre, a literary trail built on Mimmo Sammartino's novel “Vito ballava con le streghe”: seven stops, seven scenes, sound in the woods.
Visiting
There are two lines, one for each direction: you launch from Castelmezzano, land at Pietrapertosa, then fly the route in reverse to get back to where you started. The service is seasonal and the calendar changes from year to year, so check it before setting off; you fly in a harness, alone or in pairs. Anyone who would rather not repeat the cable walks back along the Percorso delle Sette Pietre, a good hour and a half of trail. Either way, set aside a full day: the mountain roads that get you here are narrow and slow, and both villages can only be covered on foot, uphill.
Our editors' tip
We fly early in the morning, when the air is still and the valley is in shadow, and keep the afternoon for the footpath. But the real advice is a different one: stay the night. Castelmezzano has lost more than half its people in sixty years and by day it fills with visitors who arrive, fly and leave; in the evening, once the coaches have gone, what remains is the light on the rock and a village of a few hundred taking its square back.
