Sila surprises from the beginning, because it rises in the middle of a long and narrow tongue of the Mediterranean centre; it is an emigrant in a land of emigrants, a piece of the Alps that over millions of years has travelled a journey "on the contrary", going down from the north to the south.

Its geological characteristics, together with those due to its geographic position, determine a series of unique landscapes at European, if not even world level. Covered with trees, and not by chance nicknamed always "Great Wood of Italy", has been exploited for millennia for the construction of ships, houses, churches, since the time of Magna Graecia, if not from before.