Grotta del Vento

This guide to Grotta del Vento near Lucca starts with an unsolved chill: a crack in the mountainside that breathes cold air even through Tuscan summers, used for three centuries by the hamlet of Trimpello as a natural refrigerator. It follows the village children of 1898 who kept feeling that same icy draft pouring from a crack barely wide enough for a rabbit, and who sent in the smallest person they had, a four year old girl, to see where it led. The boys widened the gap with shovels and reached a chamber they nicknamed the Hall of the Bear before superstitions about demons stopped them cold. Stand near the grate now and feel the same cold breath that once kept a whole village fed.