Furore Alta — The Suspended Village
Furore Alta is the upper residential core of the comune, a cluster of whitewashed houses, a Romanesque church and a maze of mule-track lanes strung along a ridge so narrow that some houses have a window looking north towards the mountains and a back door opening south over a 200-metre drop to the sea. It is one of the most architecturally vertiginous inhabited places in Europe.
The Church of Sant'Elia Profeta
The parish church of Sant'Elia Profeta, dating to the 12th century with later Baroque additions, anchors the upper village. Its simple whitewashed campanile is visible from the sea below and serves as a navigation landmark for fishing boats — a function it has performed for nearly a thousand years.
Inside, look for the polychrome marble altar and a 17th-century wooden crucifix attributed to a Neapolitan workshop; the sacristy holds a small collection of ex-votos painted by fishermen who survived storms, vivid folk-art documents of life on this dangerous coast.
Daily Life & Local Character
Furore has a permanent population of barely 800 people, and the upper village feels genuinely lived-in rather than curated for tourists: washing lines stretch between houses, cats sleep on warm stone steps, and the alimentari near the church sells local wine, lemon conserves and hand-rolled pasta to go.
The village hosts the Furore Prize (Premio Furore) each August, an international art and poetry competition founded in 1969 that has attracted figures including Pablo Neruda and Eduardo De Filippo — a remarkable cultural legacy for a settlement this size.
Wandering the Lanes
There are no prescribed walking routes in the upper village — the pleasure is in getting mildly lost on the stepped caruggi (alleyways) and stumbling onto unexpected terraces with sudden sea views.
The best light for photography is in the late afternoon when the sun drops behind the Lattari ridge and the warm backlight catches the whitewash and the bougainvillea simultaneously. Allow at least two hours to wander properly.
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