Zungri

Zungri comes from a Greek word meaning a height, a hill, and the village indeed stands on a rise, in the country behind Vibo Valentia. It has one distinction that no other place can take from it: of all the comuni of Italy, set in alphabetical order, Zungri is the last. It is also a comune that has lost a piece of itself: the hamlet of Papaglionti was abandoned after a flood, in 1952, and the people who lived there never came back. The coat of arms and the gonfalon, on the other hand, are recent: they were granted only in 1986.

A little outside the built-up area there is a rock settlement carved into the soft stone of the hill, which people here call the City of Stone, or simply the Caves. It is a whole village of dwellings made by taking rock away, set out on several levels. And what stands out about that village, in a country where more or less everything has been catalogued, is how little is known about it: the studies are still very few, and what it was for and when it was made remain open questions. In 2022 some scenes of a film about Joachim of Fiore were shot among those caves, and the City of Stone was used to play the part of Jerusalem.