By Our Editorial Staff
Imagine waking up in a farmhouse in Mugello before the sun has fully risen. Outside the window, hills that don’t seem designed to please anyone. Just hills real ones, with their imperfections and their crooked morning light. Put on your shoes. Step outside. From that moment on, you are inside the Orme del Mugello.
The project is built on a simple and powerful idea: this territory holds a layered, rare, often hidden history. Driving through it is not enough. A weekend with a weather app open is not enough. To understand Mugello, you have to walk it. You have to give it time to speak. And you have to be willing to listen, without already knowing what you expect to hear.
That’s how 14 routes were created. Each with its own theme, its own soul, its own direction.
There is the Medici Mugello: 23 km through the villas where Lorenzo de’ Medici used to retreat when Florence became too loud, too heavy, too political. Landscapes that were already perfect back then, and still are. Then there is the route of the Great Painters, following the traces of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Andrea del Castagno: not inside a museum, but in the places they looked at while painting. The difference is not small. It’s one thing to observe a masterpiece inside a gilded frame. It’s another to stand exactly where it was born.
For those who want to go deeper, the Christian Mugello stretches for 211 km through forgotten hermitages, Romanesque churches where time seems to have folded in on itself, and abbeys that have endured for centuries. Eight to ten days to cross them all. A journey that feels like a long breath, the kind you don’t know you need until you take it.
Then there is the history that has passed through this land.
The Risorgimento trail: 128 km through anecdotes and places tied to the Italian Unification. The Mugello that resists, along the partisan routes of the Liberation. The Mugello to defend, along the Gothic Line. Stories the landscape still carries on its shoulders, in peeling walls, in the names of small villages, in the silence of certain summer afternoons that seem to hold something both heavy and important.
And for those who want to stop less and breathe more, there is the Breath Trail: 6 km. Half a day. Nothing epic. Just Mugello slowly teaching you how to truly slow down.
You don’t need to be a hiker. You don’t need technical gear or steel calves. The routes cover all levels, from easy walks to demanding treks. Many can be done by bike, on horseback, with a dog. There is even the Mugello to drink: 77 km through Pinot Noir, Vin Santo, and Sangiovese, for those who want each stage to end with something worth tasting.
But the most interesting part is not the variety. It’s the freedom.
You can take just one route, complete it over a weekend, and go home. Or you can connect them, build a journey that lasts weeks, move day by day without a rush you didn’t choose. Sleep in a different place every night, eat tortelli di patate, wake up in the morning with shoes still damp from the dew and the feeling that yesterday left you with something you don’t yet know how to name.
Mugello doesn’t ask you to impress anyone. It doesn’t ask for posts or stories to tell.
It only asks you to be there, completely, for a few days.
And the Orme are simply the way to get there.
Info: www.ormedelmugello.it
