Italy Nature Reserves 2025: The National Parks and Protected Areas Worth Visiting

How King Victor Emmanuel II's hunting grounds saved the Alpine ibex — and became Italy's first national park

The Alpine ibex (Capra ibex) was extinct throughout the Alps by 1850 except for a single population of approximately 60 animals in the Gran Paradiso massif of the Aosta Valley — surviving specifically because King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia (later Italy's first king after unification) had declared the massif a royal hunting reserve in 1856, prohibiting all hunting by anyone except the royal household. The king's motivation was not conservation but personal hunting pleasure — he wanted to reserve the ibex for his own expeditions. The accidental consequence: 70 years of royal hunting prohibition, during which the ibex population slowly recovered to approximately 3,000 animals by the time the reserve became the Gran Paradiso National Park in 1922. The 1922 donation of the royal reserve to the Italian state (by Victor Emmanuel III, who found it politically awkward to maintain a personal hunting reserve in the post-WWI democratic era) created Italy's first national park directly from a royal hunting ground. The 8,000+ ibex that now inhabit the Gran Paradiso and have recolonized the entire Alpine chain (ibex have been reintroduced to Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Slovenia from Gran Paradiso stock) are all descended from those 60 animals that survived under royal protection. The accidental conservationism of a king who simply wanted to shoot ibex without competition saved the species for the entire continent.