Someone is ready to swear that they have recently seen some Gnomes in the wood of Armina, above Bagno di Romagna.
In the past, some witnesses had told about the presence in the area of strange creatures, like gnomes and sprites, of "wonderful" and prodigious phenomena (the so-called "gorga nera", the hole of the fairies…) populating and animating woods and forests.
When men lived in a mostly wild environment, unknown and hostile, they used to interpret natural phenomena as extraordinary, marvellous, prodigious, or frightful events, which - since they could not understand them - they thought to derive from strange beings or mysterious forces.
For this reason they created legends - which with the passing of time have inspired our grandparents' deeds, beliefs, and behavior - in which woods, forests, and caves - the privileged seat of the above-mentioned creatures - have become places of mysterious events, apparitions, mysterious places where everything could happen or appear: that is places where the materialization of human fears, doubts, and fantasies could occur, since the collective imagination felt the need to confine and conceal them.
Nowadays the fear does not derive from imagination, but from reality; mystery and wonder have changed their content, and nature is finally considered as a friend.
It is difficult nowadays to lose oneself in the wood: it is a "domestic" place where you can sight roe deer, squirrels, mushroom seekers, hunters, hikers, tourists... However, the place has preserved its sacredness, and it is enchanting, rich in suggestions with its echoes, sudden silences, presences, rustlings, lights and shadows which can deceive eyes and mind.
A sudden flash of a squirrel, some leaves moved by a puff of wind, a reflection on the ferns shining with dew, the thud of a berry, the whirr of a sparrow, a beam of light among the morning vapors of a beech tree wood... might influence you and might excite your imagination to the extent that you might catch sight of mysterious and tender presences like the Gnomes moving in the undergrowth.
Their recent "sighting" has attracted the attention of TV and newspapers, and Bagno di Romagna has become the "Land of the Gnomes". As a consequence, a path and a fairy tales book has been dedicated to them.
After all, it is nice and important to believe that these nice creatures with the red cap might live in the surroundings, since it means that the territory has the quality to evoke suggestions and fairy tales.
Indeed, the Gnomes would willingly live in Bagno di Romagna. There are lakes and stream, woods, forests, wild gorges, mountains, abandoned valleys, where deer, roe deer, fallow deer, squirrels, and eagles live... and where also the wolf has returned: it is exactly the place where fairy tales tell us they live in!
They also tell that these kindly and industrious little beings are the keepers of the treasures that Nature has spread in the underground and in the woods, and that they work to maintain them uncontaminated, and to preserve them.
Well, here the "treasures" Nature has lavished are indeed uncontaminated and well-preserved.
First of all the wide territory, part of which - the most precious and uncontaminated part - is included in the Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi, Monte Falterona e Campigna, and forms the first "wild" area in Italy, the "Wilderness Area of Fosso del Capanno", an area which Tarzan might like.
Then the air, as it is demonstrated by the continuous phytomonitoring; the waters, springing in these mountains and descending to the Riviera romagnola.
The thermal waters are another natural "treasure": they come from millennia from the unknown depth of the earth, and are a local small but healthy "mystery", like anything else in the area.
Yes! If we have a closer look, Bagno di Romagna is a fairy-like place indeed.
But…do not gnomes live in fairy tales?