Hiking on Apuane Alps

Last week I went to Apuane Alps. Apuane Mountains were named Alps for their strong likeness to the Northern Alps in the Napoleonic period. Before the institution of the Department of Cisalpine Republic the Tuscany Alps were known as Panie. The massif is formed by high mountains with a severe alpine appearance: very steep mountain sides, vertical rock faces, rocky crests, sharp ridges, and cirques too, originally formed by the glaciers' erosion of the Last Quaternary Glacial Age.
This extraordinary mountain scenery on the sea is clearly different from the landscape of the Northern Appennines, which is characterized by quite gentle slopes and round ridges. Apuane Alps and Northern Appennines are divided by the Serchio River Valley, known as Garfagnana.The Apuane Alps extend in NW-SE direction for the most part parallel to the Tirrenian Coast. They are in the north-west part of Tuscany near the border with Liguria. The mountain system is about 37 miles long and 12 miles wide, and it has a square measure of about 390 square miles. From the coastal plain along the Tirrenian Sea, named Versilia, the impressive mountains stand out a clear-cut hill belt covered by woodlands, olive groves and vineyards. This inaccessible territory, as the Northern Appennines, Lunigiana, Garfagnana, and Eastern Liguria, was populated by the Ligurian Apuans. In the final centuries B.C. these preromans natives were divided in small familial tribes and dispersed and relegated on the Mountains of the Northern Appennines and Apuane Alps by the advance and territorial expansion of the Celts, Etruscans and Latins. Ligurian Apuans founded their villages half hillside in sunny positions or over rocky hillocks defended by the presence of rocky slopes and gullys. This ancient villages were named Castellari by the Romans. The ancient Ligurians held out against the Romans more than one hundred years, and they left numerous archaeological evidences (corpus of Statue Stelae, ruins of hill villages, and sepulchral grounds).
Monte Sagro is one of the highest and most impressive mountains visible from the coastal area, and its name Monte Sagro (Sacred Mountain) was given by the Romans who recognized the ancient veneration of the Ligurian Apuans to these mountains.
Dante Alighieri, during his exile out of Florence, was guest of the Malaspina Marquis of Massa Estate and it is said that he was inspired by the Apuane Alps cragged mountain landscape to imagine and describe the Inferno scenery.
Furthermore in the XXII Canto of Inferno the great poet cited Mount Tambura, once Known as Mount Tambernicchi, and Mount Pania, once named Pietrapana:

Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me

And underfoot a lake, that from the frost

The semblance had of glass, and not of water.

So thick a veil ne'er made upon its current

In winter-time Danube in Austria,

Nor there beneath the frigid sky the Don,

As there was here; so that if Tambernich

Had fallen upon it, or Pietrapana,

E'en at the edge 'twould not have given a creak.

Dante described Cocito, the deep ice chasm in the bottom of the Inferno abyss, the bottom of the Universe, as a deep and dark frozen lake surrounded by the overhanging rocky slopes of the Inferno: the ice is so deep and strong that if Mount Tambura or Mount Pania collapse into the lake they would not able to crack the ice, along the borders too.