A short, easy walk through beech and hornbeam from the village of Camposilvano leads to a strange clearing of stubby rock pillars known as the Valley of the Sphinxes. The pinnacles are remnants of an ancient seabed: a hard cap of nummulite limestone has protected a softer marl beneath, leaving free-standing columns up to seven or eight metres tall. Local guidebooks insist they look like crouching animals; in practice they look more like a forgotten chess set, but the effect is genuinely strange.
The site combines neatly with the nearby Covolo di Camposilvano, a vast collapsed cavern almost a hundred metres deep with a viewing platform at the lip. Both are signposted from the same car park and can be seen in an hour.