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First among the 41 thousand sites of the FAI census on the places of the heart 2026. It is a truly exceptional result that is emerging for the small hill town of Verzino (Alto Crotonese), which with its rock caves, currently leads the ranking of beautiful and unknown places in Italy that the Italian Environment Fund has selected for the “vote and save” your place of the heart competition. The initiative provides that the top three classified at national level will receive prizes of 70,000, 60,000 and 50,000 euros respectively. Furthermore, all the places that have exceeded the threshold of 3,000 votes (already well exceeded by the Verzino rock caves) will be able to present a project to the FAI call for contributions in 2027 for contributions of up to 50,000 euros, which are assigned after the technical evaluation of the project, according to eight parameters, each of which is assigned a specific score. An opportunity to be seized – they thought of Verzino – where a committee was formed with the aim of protecting and enhancing the rock caves dug over millennia on the slopes of the ancient “spur” district.
The “Friends of the Rock Caves” committee chaired by Mimmo Grande, supported by the city administration led by Francesco Levato and backed by the FAI Delegation of Crotone and Santa Severina represented by Teresa Amoruso, has launched a real online mobilization to promote the candidacy of the Verzino site which in its territory also hosts an interesting block of karst caves with suggestive underground routes. The call to vote online (voting until December 15th) involved the Proloco, the Misericordia di Verzino, the local Avis and Civil Protection, the La Ginestra cultural association, the Le Grave speleo group and the Verzino Adventure association which have always spent money on promoting the area. A mobilization that involved the communities of Verzine residents scattered around the world and which has so far borne fruit, with a surge of online consensus that in just a few days has brought the Verzine site to first place among the locations of the FAI 2026 census.
The place is worth the rest. Recently recognized as part of the “Regional Nature Reserve of the Vitravo River and the Rock Caves of Verzino”, in addition to the beauty and uniqueness of the place, it preserves traces of the history of the town (the ancient Vertinae from the Augustan era). Inhabited in the pre-Roman age by the Coni and Enotri populations, the suggestive settlement carved into the rock was also the ancient home of the Basilian monks, who escaped from the Byzantine East during the iconoclastic persecutions between the 8th and 9th centuries. The Basilian monks who lived there channeled the rainwater into underground cisterns. Over the centuries, the Caves have been inhabited by entire families and have had various uses: up until the 1950s there were still families who inhabited them and were then used as a shelter for farm animals. In the first decade of the 2000s they were cleaned and made accessible to the public.