canyon exploring with Michele Angileri

Forra di Vietri

The village of Vietri di Potenza rises perched on the wall of a deep stately canyon.

I remember ...

I spent almost the whole summer 1999 at work. By chance I had been hired as a teacher in an intensive vocational training course, which took place from June to September. The pay was good and the money needed ... so at the beginning of summer I accompanied my wife and daughter in Calabria and returned to work in Lazio. I went in Calabria every two weeks to spend a little time with family, not more than a couple of days.

The road to Calabria is long and the landscape is always the same ... unless you do a different road! the travel gets longer but also more interesting :-) That's how I passed at Vietri and noticed the canyon. Of course I did a short reconnaissance: canyon looked beautiful but also polluted, as often happens to canyons that are at the foot of a village.
Because my sport is called "canyoning" and not "garbaging" I decided not to explore it.

16 years after I returned to Vietri, just to take a look on canyon's conditions. I had a nice surprise: the conditions of the stream had improved a lot. The City had evidently better organized waste management, and the citizens of Vietri had developed a greater sense of civic duty. The floods of the river had done the rest.
And the canyon was still unexplored!

Then it's fate, I told myself ... The time has come!

Photographs in this website show ultralight ropes (6 mm ropes made of high tenacity fibers). Read multimedia book Ultralight ropes canyoning technique to learn how to use them.

Copyright © 2002- Michele Angileri. All rights reserved.