Verzino

Below the old village, on the western flank of the hill, there open about a hundred small caves cut into the soft sandstone, set on four distinct levels and linked to one another by paths and steps cut in the rock; forty-three of them have been surveyed and described one by one. They seem to be of the late Middle Ages, and some are still in use: livestock is sheltered in them, or tools and food are kept there. The village itself sits on something of the same kind, a rock settlement carved into the sandstone faces of the hill, terraced, which suggests it has been lived in since the Byzantine age. And in another locality opens the cave of the Furfari, which is Neolithic.

What the name means is disputed three ways. Some say the Arabs gave it, for the brazilwood that grew here in quantity, a wood used for dyeing. Others prefer another plant, the Bruttian cabbage that Pliny the Elder names and that people here still call virdia. Others again identify the place with the Vertinae that Strabo mentions; Strabo also attributes the foundation to Philoctetes, which the source assigns, with very high probability, to the field of mythology. What is certain is what stands written on a stone inside the mother church: it was built in 1686, on flat ground, by will of the bishop of Cerenzia and Cariati — and it was built with the materials of the old church, which stood on a high and precipitous slope and was pulled down for the purpose. Silver used to be mined here, and gypsum and alabaster in the hamlet of Vigne, until the veins ran out. And until 2002 the comune's arms carried, on red, two silver roe deer set one above the other.