  'Red nuggets' are a rare population of passive compact massive galaxies
thought to be the first massive galaxies that formed in the Universe. First
found at $z \sim 3$, they are even less abundant at lower redshifts, and it is
believed that with time they mostly transformed through mergers into today's
giant ellipticals. Those red nuggets which managed to escape this fate can
serve as unique laboratories to study the early evolution of massive galaxies.
In this paper, we aim to make use of the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift
Survey to build the largest up-to-date catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed
red nuggets at the intermediate redshift $0.5<z<1.0$. Starting from a catalogue
of nearly 90 000 VIPERS galaxies we select sources with stellar masses
$M_{star} > 8\times10^{10}$ $\rm{M}_{\odot}$ and effective radii
$R_\mathrm{e}<1.5$ kpc. Among them, we select red, passive galaxies with old
stellar population based on colour--colour NUVrK diagram, star formation rate
values, and verification of their optical spectra. Verifying the influence of
the limit of the source compactness on the selection, we found that the sample
size can vary even up to two orders of magnitude, depending on the chosen
criterion. Using one of the most restrictive criteria with additional checks on
their spectra and passiveness, we spectroscopically identified only 77
previously unknown red nuggets. The resultant catalogue of 77 red nuggets is
the largest such catalogue built based on the uniform set of selection criteria
above the local Universe. Number density calculated on the final sample of 77
VIPERS passive red nuggets per comoving Mpc$^3$ increases from
4.7$\times10^{-6}$ at $z \sim 0.61$ to $9.8 \times 10^{-6}$ at $z \sim 0.95$,
which is higher than values estimated in the local Universe, and lower than the
ones found at $z>2$. It fills the gap at intermediate redshift.
