The hillsides around Massimino are dominated by chestnut trees, and they have been for a very long time. Before pasta and polenta became staples of the Italian interior, chestnut flour was the bread of the mountain poor — dried, ground, and baked into flat loaves that kept a family fed through winter. The groves around Massimino were not decoration but infrastructure, and the village economy revolved around the harvest for centuries. Many of the trees standing today are old enough to have provided chestnuts for generations of the same families.
Walking into the woods in autumn is the obvious thing to do, when the ground is thick with fallen nuts and the light comes through yellowed leaves at an angle that makes everything look like a woodcut. Bring a bag. The harvest season runs through October into early November. In other seasons the woods are also worth walking — cool in summer, mossy and quiet, with the occasional stream cutting down through the hillside. There are no marked trails as such, but the forest is open and the village is never far away.