From Castelluccio Inferiore, in about 15 minutes, we reach Rotonda, the village that houses the headquarters of the Park Authority. The village has a fairly clear subdivision, with a medieval core with the castle and a more recent area located at a lower level. Among the alleys of the village stands the Mother Church: completed in 1830, it houses a sixteenth-century marble Madonna and a seventeenth-century canvas by Pietro Antonio Ferro depicting the Holy Family. In Rotonda there is also the Pollino Naturalistic and Paleontological Museum, exhibiting fossils of prehistoric animals found in the area, including the Elephas antiquus. The Monumental complex of Santa Maria della Consolazione hosts, in addition to the Park headquarters, also the Ecomuseum: an open laboratory at the centre of a museum network that covers the entire territory. Much interest in this area of Basilicata also derives from the Fir Festival, a rite that takes place in June in conjunction with the celebration of Sant’Antonio da Padova: joining in marriage, in one of the arboreal rites typical of Basilicata, are a beech (´a pitu) and a silver fir (´a rocca), first felled and then transported thanks to the support of oxen. Once in the village they are grafted with each other and raised with ropes and wooden supports, giving life to a single tree 30 meters high. A propitiatory meaning linked to the fertility of the earth is traditionally attributed to the rite.
