Piana sits on the slopes of the Mainalo mountain, above the plain of Arcadia, near the ruins of the ancient city of Dipaia. The terrain is steep and forested — exactly the kind of ground that the armed irregular fighters known as the Armatoloi and Kleftes had exploited for generations before 1821. During the Ottoman period these fighters, outlaws and resisters depending on one's point of view, used the mountains as refuges and staging grounds. When the revolution came, the inaccessibility that had always defined Piana became a military asset. Kolokotronis established command posts in the surrounding villages — Piana, Dimitsana, Stemnitsa, Zarachova — and the local population fed and sheltered the fighters preparing to take Tripolitsa. The village's population today is just 57 people (2021 census). The mountains haven't changed.

Seven kilometers west of Piana lies Limpovisi, the ancestral home of the Kolokotronis family. Theodoros Kolokotronis — called *Geros tou Moria*, the Old Man of the Morea — grew up here and in these mountains. A Venetian census of 1711 recorded 500 residents at Limpovisi; today it is a hamlet, but the Kolokotronis family house has been restored and functions as a museum. The church of Ai-Yannis stands in the courtyard. Nearby, the depopulated settlement of Arkoudorevma — abandoned as an official settlement in 1928 — occupies a gorge where ruins of old houses survive alongside a stone spring tap and the 1719 church of the Virgin Mary. The territory was mountainous enough that it too served as a reorganization point for revolutionary forces before the battles of 1821. The waters of the Arkoudorevma gorge eventually join the Elissonas river, which crosses the plain of Piana below.

The Elissonas river — sometimes written Elisson — rises at the foot of the Pianovouni mountain and crosses the plain of Piana. Watermills once lined its length: at one point, twelve stone mills ground the region's cereals, and six stone washing facilities cleaned the heavy wool clothing of the mountain villages. Some of those stone structures survive. The Elissonas supplies water to the residents of Tripoli, the prefecture capital, further into the plain. Then, midway across the Piana plain, the river does something strange: it sinks. The water disappears underground, believed to resurface near Megalopolis to the west. Rivers with this behavior — called katavoths in Greek — were common enough in limestone Arcadia that the ancients incorporated them into mythology. The Elissonas vanishes and, somewhere, reappears.

On Pianovouni, the mountain above the Elissonas springs, local tradition places a cave belonging to Pan. The goat-footed god of wild places and shepherds was one of the most deeply rooted of the Arcadian deities — this was his terrain, the high meadows and rocky gorges where flocks grazed. The name Piana itself may derive from Panas, an alternative form of the god's name. Whether the etymology holds or not, the association fits: this is exactly the kind of landscape Pan was said to haunt, where unexpected sounds in the trees could be attributed to the god's presence, where the word *panic* — named for him — came from the inexplicable terror that can take hold in lonely places.

The Folklore Museum of Piana preserves what daily life in this landscape looked like for the generations before the modern era: tools, vessels, religious heirlooms, and objects from the revolutionary period.

Piana grows potatoes, walnuts, tomatoes, courgettes, cauliflowers, and beans. For generations it was also famous for apple production — particularly the Delicious Pilafa variety, prized in the regional markets of Tripoli. That cultivation has largely stopped, the apple trees abandoned because of high labor requirements, variable yields, and susceptibility to disease and weather. The firs that cover much of the mountain, however, produce something the region has come to be known for: fir honey. The Honey of Fir Mainalou Vanilla is a protected product, dense and dark with a resinous sweetness that comes from the fir forests. The mountains that kept armies hidden and gave Pan a cave to inhabit also give the bees something to work with.