Rock Drawings in Valcamonica
Incisioni rupestri della Val Camonica
Interesting facts
- Most of the engravings were made by pecking: a hammer-like stone or metal tool struck rows of tiny round pits into the rock surface.
- The oldest carvings, from roughly the 8th to 6th millennium BC, were left by nomadic hunters and show large prey such as deer and elk.
- Iron Age engravings make up an estimated 70 to 80 per cent of all the figures recorded in the valley.
- Copper Age carvings document novelties of their time, including the wheel, the wagon, ploughing scenes and the first signs of metalworking.
- In the Middle Ages people carved Christian crosses and keys over the older pagan images, apparently to sanctify the rocks.
- The rock surfaces were scoured smooth by the glacier that shaped the valley and began to be exposed when the ice retreated about 15,000 years ago.
- The first written report on the carvings dates from 1909, when Walther Laeng flagged two decorated boulders near Cemmo to the national monuments authorities.
- In the 1930s German scholars Franz Altheim and Erika Trautmann read Nazi racial ideology into the carvings, claiming them as evidence of an Aryan ancestry.
- Archaeologist Emmanuel Anati began exploring the valley in 1956 and founded the Camunian Centre of Prehistoric Studies there in 1964.
- Engraving never fully stopped: small numbers of marks have been identified from Roman and medieval times and possibly as late as the 19th century.
Why it is worth it
Valcamonica, the long valley of the river Oglio in the Lombard Alps, holds one of the largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the world. When it was inscribed in 1979 it became Italy's first World Heritage Site, with more than 140,000 figures recognised; continued survey has since pushed the catalogue to somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 engravings. They were pecked into rock surfaces smoothed by Alpine glaciers — sloping slabs of bedrock and large erratic boulders — and together they form a picture chronicle that runs from after the Ice Age through the Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, and on, in scattered later marks, into historical times.
Most of the engravings date from the Iron Age and are attributed to the Camunni, the Alpine people who gave the valley its name. Their images are full of movement: armed figures locked in duels, hunting scenes, deer and domestic animals, weapons and geometric signs. One emblem has escaped the rocks altogether — the so-called Camunian rose, a curving, four-lobed figure of dotted lines, which Lombardy adopted as its official symbol. Above Capo di Ponte, at Bedolina, a sandstone slab of about 35 square metres, engraved around the middle of the first millennium BC, is read as a map of cultivated plots, paths and villages — one of the oldest topographic images known.
The richest place to begin is the Parco Nazionale delle Incisioni Rupestri at Naquane above Capo di Ponte, the valley's first rock-art park, founded in 1955. Across 14 hectares of woodland, walking paths of about three kilometres lead to more than a hundred engraved rocks, Nearby are the Cemmo boulders, two large sandstone blocks carved in the Copper Age with ibex, wolves, daggers and axes, and the Seradina-Bedolina park; the national prehistory museum in Capo di Ponte displays carved stelae and finds. Visit when the light is low: engravings nearly invisible at midday appear sharply in the slanting sun of morning or evening.
Getting there
The main parks cluster around Capo di Ponte, in the middle of the valley — about 70 km by road from Bergamo, 90 km from Brescia and 120 km from Milan. Brescia's Gabriele d'Annunzio Airport (VBS) is roughly 66 km in a straight line; most visitors fly into the larger airports of Bergamo or Milan. Trains on the Brescia–Iseo–Edolo line stop at Capo di Ponte. At Naquane, roadside parking lies about 300 metres from the entrance.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The rock drawings in Valcamonica are located in the Province of Brescia, Italy, and constitute the largest collections of prehistoric petroglyphs in the world. The collection was recognized by UNESCO in 1979 and was Italy's first recognized World Heritage Site. UNESCO has formally recognized more than 140,000 figures and symbols, but new discoveries have increased the number of catalogued incisions to between 200,000 and 300,000. The petroglyphs are spread on all surfaces of the valley, but concentrated in the areas of Darfo Boario Terme, Capo di Ponte, Nadro, Cimbergo and Paspardo.
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