In the Corridor of Footprints, the clay floor still holds the tracks of the people who crossed the Bàsura cave 12,000 years ago. A little further on, in a natural channel where ancient floods gathered them, lie thousands of bones of Ursus spelaeus: the cave bear used the cavity as a den for hibernation between 50,000 and 24,000 years ago, and many of them never woke up. That, even before the stalactites, is what makes the Toirano Caves known well beyond Liguria.
What to see
The equipped route runs through two cavities of the karst system of the Val Varatella: the Bàsura cave, whose name means witch in Ligurian, and the Lower Santa Lucia cave. In the Bàsura, past the Corridor of Footprints, you go down to the Hall of the Little Lake, a sheet of water inhabited by tiny troglobitic crustaceans of the genus Niphargus, then to the Bears' Cemetery and the Hall of Mysteries, where the human traces are concentrated: prints on the ground, charcoal marks on the walls and clay pellets still stuck to the rock. The final chamber, the cave of Cybele, was only reached in 1960, and its mammillary concretions are a rarity among Europe's show caves.
The second half of the route changes register. No fossils or human traces have been found in the Lower Santa Lucia, because its entrance was sealed during the Pleistocene; what remains are corridors lined with brilliant white coralloids studded with aragonite crystals, and the Hall of the Pantheon, with the largest column on the whole itinerary, eight metres from floor to vault. The far end of the cavity, the Tanone, sheltered Toirano families during the bombing raids of the Second World War; today it hosts the experimental archaeology workshops of VaratellaLab, summer concerts and, since 2013, the ageing of sparkling wines.
Visiting
The complex has been open to the public since 1953, three years after a group of Toirano men broke through the stalagmite screen that closed off the inner halls of the Bàsura. The route is one-way and about 1.3 km long: you enter through the Bàsura on the northern side and come out of the Lower Santa Lucia to the south-west, after crossing the artificial tunnel dug in 1967 to link the two caves. There are steps up and down, the air is damp and the temperature does not change with the seasons: closed shoes and a sweatshirt even in mid-August. The caves lie inland from Borghetto Santo Spirito, five kilometres from the A10 motorway exit.
Our editors' tip
Set aside another half hour for the Prehistoric Museum of the Val Varatella, open since 2014 in the rooms beside the ticket office: it gathers finds from the caves of the area and reassembles the skeleton of a cave bear, which looks quite different once you have walked past the Bears' Cemetery. And if you come up in summer, ask about the Santa Lucia Superiore cave sanctuary: a shrine was built at its mouth between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it opens only in the warm months.