The natural park of the Bosco della Partecipanza and the Vercelli granges was established in 1991 and covers 1907.94 hectares in the province of Vercelli. It is one of the last patches of lowland forest in the Po plain: a remnant of the great woods that once covered the plain and were almost entirely felled in the Middle Ages to make room for fields. In Roman times the area was probably a sacred grove.
What to see
Oaks and poplars are the prevailing trees, but the real wealth is in the undergrowth: more than four hundred different plant species have been counted, a figure no longer found anywhere in the cultivated plain. The wood works as an island. All around lies the rice monoculture, which has simplified the environment to the point of making it inhospitable for many animal species; in here those same species find refuge, and that is why the park matters above all for conservation. Within its boundaries stand the abbey of Santa Maria di Lucedio, the abbey of Montarolo and the church of the Madonna delle Vigne.
Visiting
The reason this wood still exists is not natural but legal, and it lies in the name. The Partecipanza is an association of families to which Boniface I, marquis of Montferrat, granted the use of the woodland in 1202. Since then those families have run the wood under strict rules on timber taking and permitted felling, rules that go back to the Middle Ages and that nobody has ever stopped applying. While the forest was being cleared all around, here a collective right of use did what no protection law could have done for eight centuries running.
Our editors' tip
The forest tracks are wide, flat and shady, and can be walked or cycled without effort: it is the right outing on a summer day, when the surrounding paddy fields turn into an oven. The park is twinned with the Réserve des Cascades de Banfora, in Burkina Faso, a pairing that seems odd until you consider that both are protected areas in the middle of intensive farmland. It is worth combining the visit with Lucedio, which stands inside the park: you grasp more clearly that wood and paddy field are not two opposite landscapes but two outcomes of the same medieval reclamation.