Category: Cultures

Rites and graffiti from prehistory: the Romito cave

Florentine archaeologist Paolo Graziosi, among the foremost experts in studies of prehistoric art, could not guess what awaited him in Calabria. In the rugged lands of Papasidero, within the Pollino National Park, a ravine was found. Vegetation had invaded the Romito cave, which had been buried by millennia of oblivion. The cavity opened into a…
The strange glyphs of the rongorongo

Few times throughout history a form of writing originated ex novo, without deriving from systems already in use1. This is the case, for instance, with the ancient Sumerian cuneiform or some pre-Columbian systems from Central America. Such a rare occurrence also seems to concern a very special writing that no scholar still could decipher: the…
The Roman Nîmes, an Augustan colony in Gaul

Along the Via Domitia, an important Roman road that ran from Turin to Iberia through the Rhone Valley, stood Nemausus, the ancient city of Nîmes. Parthenius of Nicaea handed down a legend that there was an eponymous hero, son of Hercules and founder of the settlement, named Nemausos1. Instead the city, located near a sacred…
The bronze statuettes and the identity of Nuragic people

The wide fields looking westward, and the towers of the nuraghes like peaks of a barren hilly landscape. Never domed nor concealed, the stone peered over the vivid swarming of men. Some adorned with shining armaments and round shields, fierce warriors with horned helmets resting on their foreheads, placed to guard the territories where the…
Monterozzi necropolis and a journey into the underworld

We could never have known anything about the Etruscans, a people of ancient Italy who lived between the 9th and 1st centuries BC, if they had not given death the same importance as life. In the 7th and 6th centuries BC, when Etruscan civilization reached its military and cultural peak, houses and temples were built…
The Dolmen of Chianca and ancestral rites of passage

On August 6, 1909, archaeologists Francesco Samarelli and Angelo Mosso were going to Bisceglie, in the narrow strip of Apulia among the gentle slopes of the Murge and plunges into the warm embrace of the Adriatic Sea. They had received news from a group of local farmers: some large stone slabs had emerged from the…
The cult of Isis in Benevento

“Isis the Great, the God’s Mother, Sothis, Queen of the Gods, Lady of the Sky, the Earth, and the Netherworld. Regnal year eight, under the majesty of the Horus, the Strong Bull, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Lord of the Two Lands, Horus, the God’s Son, beloved of all the gods, the…
The menhirs of Sardinia and the cult of the ancestors

What reason was there in raising the stone, in elevating the sacred beyond the ground and, between the physical and the metaphysical, in creating paths that led towards desires for eternity? The menhirs of Sardinia traced obscure routes, enigmatic to the eyes of us, human beings of today. Stone is essential, and in its hardness…
The sanctuary of Monte d’Accoddi, sacred centre of Sardinia

At the beginning of the third millennium B.C., at Monte d’Accoddi, someone raised his eyes to the sky. And, in the light of the night, he saw in the firmament the divine image of the mother, the Great Goddess, generator and nurturer of the Universe. Like the beings on earth, the stars had their own…
The domus de janas and the Sardinian hypogeic tombs

In Sardinia, a primitive spiritual feeling that aims at self-knowledge and understanding of the world is expressed through stone since the Palaeolithic age. Stone is thus moulded as an image of one’s own being, anthropomorphic features become increasingly explicit in art, and architecture is the full expression of the sacredness. The ancient Sardinians trace thresholds…