Mount Scalambra is the best place to launch a paraglider or hang-glider and has three different heights for takeoff.
The first take-off altitude is 890 meters and is the most widely used because it is located just 5 minutes from the historic centre. Enthusiasts land in the same spot where they took off or in a special area in the locality of La Forma.
Monte Scalambra today, with Serrone resting across its slopes, is the centre of paragliding near Rome.
Why is Serrone is so special for gliders?
Serrone is spread over the kind slopes of Mount Scalambra and it is accessible and less dangerous for flight initiation than many mountains with steep escarpments and cliffs.
Serrone has a relatively long history in gliding, since 1978, and is now known around the world as one of the top towns to experience ‘free flight’.
For most flyers, gliding is a spring or summer sport when the heat of the day creates updrafts and cross currents that enable the Serrone flyer to soar high above the hills.
It is possible to travel well over 100 km, touring over the famous Cesanese vineyards and the towns of the Ernici, with their middle-age fortresses, ancient walls and medievel castles, or even link to the Simbruini Mountains over the high plain of Arcinazzo.
Serrone Vola Club offers a wide range of take-off possibilities and provides gliding lessons with tandem gliders.
Every year in July there the Trofeo Serrone Vola event that attracts enthusiasts from afar and you can take a ride in a two-seat glider.
The story of paragliding
Many of us do ‘fly’ in our dreams, climbing into the sky and floating over our streets, parks and towns, moving with the sun, the drafts, sharing with the birds.
Heaven is in the sky in many religious traditions.
Yet except in stories of religious assumption and space walking, mankind has failed to achieve flight without wings, as his efforts have inevitably ended in an untimely descent to the ground, thereby reinforcing the ever-powerful law of gravity.
Yet, over 1500 years ago, the Chinese invented kites that would support the human frame, but subsequent attempts to make man into a winged
creature had little success.
It was Leonardo da Vinci’s dream that was only partly successful until Lilienthal built gliders in the 1890s that he could control by shifting his weight just like in a modern hang-glider.
The hang-glider is a heavier than air winged device that depends on wind and air currents, as well as human skill and dare-devilry, for its success.
There were two inventions that brought hang-gliding to its ‘day in the sun’.
In 1948, Francis and Gertrude Rogallo sought patent protection for a fully flexible kited wing known since as the Rogallo wing.
Many modifications and improvements followed with recognition for development of the modern hang-glider going to John Dickenson in 1963 and the Rogallo wing has been the most successful aerofoil design for hang-gliding.
Today the preponderance of flyers are not so much hang-gliders as para-gliders. The theory of flying under a parachute has been known since the 1950s, but the term paragliding was only coined in 1985.
It is due to three French friends in Mieussy who six years earlier, calculated that on a suitable slope, a "square" ram-air parachute could be inflated by running down the slope. They then proved their calculations sufficient in practical experiment.
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