The Environmental Madonie's Museum in Polizzi Generosa

Where do we come from:
Fruit of an aware conscience finally that the survival of the man is intimately tied to the safeguard of its natural environment, at the end of a long twisted bureaucratic and to a large extent sketchy procedure, in November 1989, a decree of the Regional Alderman to the Territory founds the Park of the Madonie, receiving and widening what was already in the contents of the famous law-picture of 1981 about e Sicilian Parks, and finally protecting in all of its aspects what remains of an anchor splendid environmental reality today. The variety of the landscape moulded by rivers and streams beside extraordinary phenomena of the Karst, together to the difference of the small communities that constitutes the connective fabric of it, each with their historical-cultural traditions that sink their own roots in the dawn of the Sicilian civilization, they make it worthy of to show up among the preserved environments of the island, attracting every year and in every season tourists and studious from all over the world. It is within the Park that Polizzi, once more Generous, occupies a place of particular relief, since it is really in its territory that we can find the most interesting naturalistic emergencies: just think about the glen Madonna of the Angels where among ilexes, astragals, stains of beech tree and carpets of juniper true living fossils superbly survive that go up again to the last glaciations, 25 plants of Abies Nebrodensis the unique existing still inserted in their own original habitat. But there is also the little pond of Plan Bucks, surrounded by what it stays of an imposing beech-wood, the natural amphitheatre of the biotope Quacella, true heaven for the botanists because rich of endemism as certain splendid orchids and the stately thick of the Carbonara that to 1979 ms. above sea-level it is among the less anthropologised of the island and therefore of exceptional importance for the survivor insular avifauna. They are only some examples but they are enough for making understand that the territory in which we live today must have been a long time ago very similar to a terrestrial heaven. Beaches, rocky coasts, woods of enormous extension, swamps, ponds, and navigable rivers: every habitat has been degraded, deeply altered by the man and not only in our generation.
At the end of the last century Bucks didn't exist anymore as well as Fallow deer, Roes. The Wild boar was extinguished, contemporarily the Wolf that didn't have natural preys anymore among the wild herbivores, owing itself to turn to those servants it ended up making the accounts with shepherds and hunters: it didn't survive to the first decades of our century. Parallel among the birds was extinguished the Francolin of dimensions similar to those of a partridge. With the reclamations before and the following drainages of so many ponds and mirrors of water disappeared whole teams of marshy birds: the Chicken sultan, the Basseting and some waders. From our mountains it disappeared the Gipeto, big vulture survived up to the 1850 only on the Madonie, from our rivers the Otter, from our woods the black Woodpecker, the green Woodpecker, from our grasslands the Field - Hen, from our plains the Quail tridattila. Last and symbolic was the extinction of the Griffon, other big vulture, once present, exterminated by the poisoned bits distributed with irresponsibility to destroy the Foxes. It is a desolating picture that sets Sicily to the tallest indexes of extinction of fauna, substantially due to the historical colonization and to the following anthropization of all of its natural environments and only in few cases to the excessive activity of hunters and poachers. That is why the Park was born and that is why one year after that it has been founded in Polizzi the Environmental Madonie's Museum.