Julie Davidson visits the Italian national park where bear and wolf roam free.

By JULIE DAVIDSON

Why did the squirrel cross the road? To confuse me. We are filling bottles with natural mineral water from a wayside fountain (courtesy of the River Aniene, which the Romans channelled 50 miles to their capital) when a large, sooty squirrel bounds across the tarmac and into the trees. "I swear I've just seen a black squirrel," I tell our Italian friends, who have missed the bushy-tailed apparition. "Do you have black squirrels in Italy?" They shrug.

The answer lies in Abruzzo. We are on our way to the autumnal mountains of this glorious region, famous for saffron, sugared almonds and a medieval economy driven by sheep, and have our sights set on Italy's wildest national park, one of three in the province. Here we are informed of the presence of "nature's main characters in the heart of the Apennine": bear, lynx and wolf as well as Abruzzo chamois, a long list of birds, reptiles and mammals and, yes, a black squirrel identified as scoiattolo meridionale - the southern squirrel.

Later, a little research with Professor Google reveals that black squirrels are mere mutations of the common grey, which we even have them in this country. More singular is the Marsican brown bear, symbol of the Abruzzo National Park, now comprehensively called the Parco Nazionale d'Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise.

Founded in 1923, it expanded its name with its territory, which today includes bits of neighbouring Lazio and Molise. And if the park logo looks a little more like Winnie the Pooh then the endemic Marsican, among the least aggressive of bear species, has every right to present itself as people-friendly.

Not long ago my husband and I bought a tiny village house near the Lazio-Abruzzo border, but this is the first time we have driven east, deep into central Italy, instead of west to Rome and the Mediterranean. Our neglect is typical; Abruzzo is barely on the radar of most British visitors besotted with lakes, art cities and Tuscan sunflowers, yet it isn't difficult to reach. In the land which perfected the engineering of mountain motorways the A24 is Italy's most thrilling autostrada, breaching the highest mountains south of the Alps. We feel we're not driving but flying, ducking through valleys, swerving round hills, swooping over castles, cliffs, churches, houses and gorges on titanic viaducts.

We come down to earth only to burrow into the ground through a three-mile tunnel near the provincial capital of L'Aquila.

I love that name, which means "eagle"; although the city was not named for the golden eagle of the Apennines but for the springs - l'acqui - which watered the land, castles and hamlets of people who were relocated there in the 13th century. Ninety-nine rural communities morphed into the new town of L'Aquila, and they are remembered by the city's most famous monument, the Fontana delle 99 Cannelle - the fountain of 99 spouts. Each outflow debouches from a single row of grotesque stone heads, lined up like the trophies of some grisly warlord.

There is much to admire in this handsome university city, but we are saving exploration for the future.

We have mountains on our mind. L'Aquila is ringed by peaks distant enough not to overwhelm it, and the most distinctive is Gran Sasso, which means "big rock". This big rock is over 9000 ft high and the centre of the regional ski industry. Its residual snowfields, waiting for winter re-enforcements, were briefly familiar to Mussolini. In 1943 the discredited Fascist president was "detained" in a hotel on the Campo Imperatore, a vast upland meadow on the Gran Sasso massif, while an ad hoc Italian government began negotiating with the Allies. On the orders of Hitler he was dramatically sprung by SS paratroopers and flown to new headquarters on Lake Garda.

We're staying on the edge of the Gran Sasso National Park, at the village of Paganica. Our base is the Villa Dragonetti, a welcoming hotel which was once the country home of local nobility. The Dragonetti family's appetite for French Empire art has bequeathed its elegant rooms a gallery of angels, cupids, landscapes and wildlife, and, supervised by a bedroom bestiary of deer, hares, wolves and bears, we are well prepared for the wilderness.

En route to the high home of the Marsican bear we become aware of Abruzzo's fastest-growing rural industry: restoration and real estate.

Despite its isolation the region was once one of the most prosperous in Italy, supplying city states and papal territories with wool. The Medici had interests here, and a "wool road" ran from Florence to L'Aquila, while an entire culture was built on the transhumanza, the movement of the mighty flocks from their summer pastures in the mountains to their winter quarters on the coastal plains of the Adriatic.

These medieval drove roads - the tratturi - can often be traced by the "waymarks" of abandoned chapels where devout shepherds broke their journeys to worship. But wool isn't the cash crop it was in the Middle Ages, and the ghost villages of Abruzzo have only two options: crumble or convert. We sense intimations of a cosmopolitan future in the ringing chisels of stonemasons and the cement mixers parked in the forecourts of empty castles; and selfishly pray that "the new Tuscany" doesn't arrive too soon.

At the moment rural Abruzzo soaks up its summer visitors and winter sports enthusiasts, while the national parks have helped stabilise the populations of some lonely villages. It's a 90-minute drive from Paganica to Pescasseroli, the pretty little upland town which hosts the visitor centre and headquarters of the Abruzzo National Park, and as we exchange the motorway for a corkscrew minor road the mountains grow dense with beech, oak and maple - fiery forests caught in the act of self-immolation. The colours make us gasp.

The park is zoned to accommodate some farming, and where there are meadows grazed by sheep we keep our eyes peeled for their traditional guardian: the spectacular Abruzzese sheepdog, which doesn't herd sheep but lives among them, camouflaged by thick white hair like wool.

Introduced to the flocks as pups, the dogs are bred for a specific task: to give marauding wolves the fright of their lives when a pretend-sheep leaps from its surrogate family to become a large and ferocious canine. And, although the wolf population of Abruzzo is now pretty small, the dogs remain on duty.

Fifty years ago the Apennine wolf was almost extinct. There was a bounty on its head, and livestock farmers had virtually won their ancient war with the predator. Then, in 1970, a core population with the new status of protected species was re-settled in the park. The old enemies had to learn to co-exist. Wolf numbers are now up to about 50, most of them monitored by radio collar (there are also remnant wolf populations elsewhere in the Apennines) and despite a plentiful supply of venison they have not entirely changed their diet.

"We introduced 20 roe deer to the park in the 70s," explains Carmelo Gentile, whom we find addressing a group of Greek conservationists at the visitor centre. "And there are now about 2000."

Dr Gentile, one of the park's ecologists, sounds a little weary. "The wolves still find it easier to kill sheep, which means we must compensate the farmers."

The protection of wolves was something of an afterthought in the history of the park, where the top predator is the Marsican, a sub-species of brown bear unique to the central Apennines. Bears also prey on livestock, but unlike wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs) children's literature has given them a powerful PR machine (Paddington, Pooh, Baloo).

There were no great protests when the park was established to protect the dwindling Marsican, which gets its name from the Marsi, an ancient people of Abruzzo. Today, however, there are occasional outbreaks of hostility.

"Last October an adult male and two cubs were found poisoned," Dr Gentile tells us. "A serious loss from a population of 30 to 50."

We don't expect to see any of the predators on our visit. Sixty-six per cent of the park is covered with forest, and although the mountains are well provided with walking trails, wolves are notoriously elusive. Bears less so; one amiable Marsican became so attached to her local village that for her own safety she was relocated to a more remote area. But there are rehabilitation units in the park where injured or orphaned animals are confined until they can be returned to the wild, and here we find two adult bears: a restless European brown and a relaxed Marsican, prone in his pen, peering dozily from a fringe of tawny hair.

I'm tempted to find him a jar of honey.

NEED TO KNOWAbruzzo and its national parks are two hours' by car from Rome or 90 minutes from Pescara, on the Adriatic coast. Long Travel (www.long-travel.co.uk, 01694 722367) specialises in hotel and self-catering holidays in southern and central Italy, and offers several hotels in the region, including the Villa Dragonetti at Paganica, eight miles from L'Aquila. Four nights at the Villa Dragonetti with car hire and return flights from Prestwick to Rome Ciampino cost from £435 per person. (This includes a discount on accommodation for any 2009 bookings received before April 2009).

Add-on holidays in Rome or elsewhere are available, and Long Travel can also arrange taxi transfers for those who don't want to drive. For more information on Abruzzo visit www.regione.abruzzo.it Carbon footprint Approximately 0.44 tonnes CO2 on a return flight from Glasgow Prestwick to Rome Ciampino, including a return car drive from Rome to Abruzzo.