Pollinello is a small spot of Calabrian hill country with no big name attached, and its real importance is where it sits: a few kilometres from the foot of the Pollino massif, in the north of the region, close to the border with Basilicata. Do not look for a pass or a monument. Think of it as a doorway into the Pollino National Park, the largest protected area in Italy, with Morano Calabro and the town of Castrovillari as the places that organise daily life around it.
The park is wild country. Pollino is famous for the Bosnian pine, the loricato, a twisted, ancient tree that clings to bare limestone ridges high above the valleys, some individuals said to be centuries old. Wolves live in these woods, along with roe deer and golden eagles. The roads that climb toward the massif from Morano, a hill town built in a steep cone like a nativity scene, are narrow and quiet, with sharp hairpins, patchy asphalt and the odd stray cow on the road.
Castrovillari, with about twenty thousand people, is the sensible place for fuel, supermarkets and a proper lunch, and Morano is smaller, at around three thousand. Frascineto, close by, is an Arbëreshë village, a community of Albanian speakers who settled in southern Italy after the Ottoman conquests of the fifteenth century and who kept their language and a Greek Orthodox rite in a Catholic country. That kind of layering is typical of Calabria, a region settled and resettled many times over.
Be honest about the weather: up high, snow can close the smaller roads from late autumn until spring, and summer afternoons bring storms that crack over the ridges. Morning is best, when the air is cool and the shepherds' dogs are quiet. Fill up in town before you head into the hills, since stations are thin once you leave the main roads, and carry water. The massif rewards the effort with space, silence and, on a clear day, the Ionian Sea hazy beyond the plain.