Geosito di Pietraroja e il dinosauro Ciro
Pietraroja
Hidden gemNature & hiking
The story
In the limestone of a vanished sea lies Ciro, the small dinosaur whose internal organs are still imprinted: the fossil that turned this Matese plateau into a place for palaeontologists.
Access
€ Paleolab
More gems in Pietraroja
- History & archaeology
Paleolab — Museo dei dinosauri
Pietraroja (BN)
Here rested Ciro, the Scipionyx samniticus: the first dinosaur found in Italy, with its soft tissues intact, and the landscape of the Sannio as it was one hundred and ten million years ago.
VillagesBorgo di Pietraroja
Pietraroja (BN)
A handful of houses clinging to the Civita, suspended over the canyon, where ham is still cured in the mountain air. The village lives in the shadow of its dinosaur, but it is the rock underfoot that tells of a hundred million years.
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via Foria
Founded in the Napoleonic age, the botanical garden on via Foria lines up glasshouses, palms and rare species across twelve hectares: a green breath a step away from the traffic.
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Pedamentina di San Martino
Vomero→centro
A fourteenth-century stairway dropping from the hill of San Martino down to the city: hundreds of steps through vegetable plots, gardens and glimpses of the bay — one of the finest urban paths in Naples.
- Nature & hiking
Vigna di San Martino
collina S. Martino
One of the largest urban vineyards in Europe, worked by the Carthusians since the fourteenth century: seven hectares of vines, citrus and olive trees hanging over the bay, a step from the city's chaos.
Nature & hikingVilla Comunale
Riviera di Chiaia
The garden stretched out along the sea at Chiaia: avenues of holm oaks, benches and old statues, with the gulf breathing beyond the iron railing.
- Nature & hiking
Acquario Anton Dohrn
Riviera di Chiaia
The oldest aquarium in Europe, opened in 1874 inside the Villa Comunale: historic tanks inhabited only by the fauna of the Gulf of Naples, behind the glass.
Nature & hikingSolfatara
Pozzuoli
The ground breathes: hissing fumaroles, mud that boils up and a smell of sulphur reminding you how alive the earth is beneath the Campi Flegrei.