Please Note: this is not the correct image, they have requested not to use it. Click this link to go see it. He is beautiful! He is a Must see!
They were encountered by Cristina Cimmino, a local resident, as she returned from a late shift at a restaurant, where she works as a waitress, and let her dog out into the garden.
First one wolf appeared out of the woods, then five or six. “I was petrified,” she said. “They were right in front of the house. It was pretty worrying.”
Elisa Ramassa, a national park ranger, said it was extremely rare to see an entire pack of wolves in the Alps.
“There are people who would pay a fortune for a similar experience,” she said. “It does happen sometimes that wolves come down from the mountains and approach inhabited areas in search of prey.”
The wolf was pushed to the verge of extinction in Italy by the 1970s, when the population dipped to just 100 individuals.
But since then a ban on shooting, trapping and poisoning has achieved spectacular success, with numbers now estimated at around 1,000.
The population is concentrated in the Alps and along the Apennines, which run north to south down the peninsula.
Across Europe, the wolf population quadrupled between 1970 and 2005, according to a study by Rewilding Europe, a conservation organisation which wants to return large areas to their original, natural state and bring back some of the continent’s most emblematic species.