Just a few kilometers away from the center of Bomarzo, in Viterbo's Tuscia, you can find a world that could be populated by fairies and gnomes, elves and talking crickets.
It’s the Chia wood, one hour from Rome, in a place so dear to the writer Pier Paolo Pasolini that he decided to spend here the last years of his life. After parking your car at the Bomarzo football field, you find the path towards the gorge: the voices of the road become a vague memory, those of nature more and more intense.
Ph. Roberta Venditti
And so the imagination goes wild: what animal will be the one that just moved among the shrubs with a quick and sudden shot? The dove, on the other hand, is immediately recognizable: it cooos fluttering among the branches of an oak with its long tail. Like the lizards, which crawl hidden among the hedges but occasionally show themselves.
The Tiber Valley, as clear as in a landscape painting, suddenly emerges on the left, in front of a large boulder placed there as to say to walkers: stop, here is a surprise that you cannot miss. And here is the forest: dense, shady, with a luxuriant green.
Ph. Roberta Venditti
Soundtrack for the descent towards the gorge is the first imperceptible, then increasingly clear roar of the Castello stream. A few fallen tree trunks along the path make the walk even more adventurous. The intensity of the sound of water measures distance.
The small caverns dug into the rock for votive purposes are a testimony that this was the land of the Etruscans, while the remains of the mill, right on the bank of the Castello stream, tell of a fervent trade activity especially in medieval times.
Ph. Roberta Venditti
With the same curiosity of a child we cross the narrow and dark tunnel just under a rocky wall, not far from the mill, until the real surprise of this wood appears before our eyes: the Fosso Castello waterfalls, among the most beautiful in Lazio yet among the least known. So spectacular, that the writer Pasolini decided to set on this background the scene of the Baptism of Jesus in the film “The Gospel according to St. Matthew”
And you can't resist the temptation to sit on a stone, put your feet in the water and watch it flow, with dreamy eyes. In the woods we are all children again.