How we tell the story of rock art: the case of Camonica Valley museums

The Regional Directorate of National Museums of Lombardy manages several sites that are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site: among the thirteen sites that the directorate manages, in addition to Valle Camonica, was the Last Supper (later passed under the Brera Picture Gallery), and they remain Castelseprio, which pertains to the UNESCO site The Lombards in Italy. Places of Power, and the exhibition, inside the museum of the Grotte di Catullo, of materials from Lugana Vecchia di Sirmione, one of the 19 Italian elements that have been inscribed in the transnational serial site Prehistoric pile-dwelling sites around the Alps. And then precisely we have the Camonica Valley. Valle Camonica was inscribed in 1979: at that time, the inscription was very fast, because from January, when the proposal was submitted (by Emmanuel Anati, the scholar who then made the rock art of Valle Camonica known all over the world, together with the Lombardy region: so there was not yet the constant involvement of the ministry), the process was concluded on October 26, 1979, so in nine months the site was inscribed.

Today, according to the guidelines for enrollment, first you get on a tentative list and then there is a procedure that lasts at least three years. As one of the first enrolled sites, when there was the Budapest Convention in 2002, it was said at that time that the ideal tool for the management of Unesco sites should be the management plan. So all the sites inscribed before 2002 also had to have a management plan: therefore, a process was implemented within the Camonica Valley, coordinated by the old Archaeological Superintendence of Lombardy, together, of course, with all the territorial authorities, because the 1979 inscription had the name “rock art of the Camonica Valley.” It was an ingenious title, because it had put within the outstanding universal value the phenomenon of rock art, and not the Park of rock engravings of Naquane, which was born in 1955 and was the first archaeological park of rock art in Italy. Over the years other park areas had then sprung up in the Valley: I am thinking in the 1970s of that of Luine in Darfo Boario Terme, and after 1979 others were born, such as the regional reserve of Ceto, Cimbergo and Paspardo, and then Sellero and Sonico in 2005, even the park of Cemmo and also the Park of Seradina-Bedolina, so today when we think of rock art in the Camonica Valley we have to think of a constant protection action by the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti paesaggio on the whole artistic manifestation of therock art, ranging from the lower Valley to the upper Valley, from 200 meters up to over 2.200 meters above sea level, and when you think of parks you have to think of a network of eight parks.

Thus, the regional directorate manages the Naquane Park, created in 1955, and the Cemmo Park, which is actually connected to the discovery of rock art dating back to 1909 (in 1909 a local scholar reported the presence of two engraved boulders in the Cemmo locality to a heritage association: reporting letter was never found but no one doubts the authenticity of this of this news and the same scholar on the first guide of the Italian Touring Club of 1914, reported precisely these two boulders). In 2014, MUPRE, the National Museum of Prehistory of the Camonica Valley, was also born. Why? Because since the 1960s, through archaeological research, with protection activities on the territory, so many archaeological contexts are discovered, so there was a need to find an ideal place to tell about the communities that left rock art manifestations. The oldest rock art manifestations known in the Valley today probably date back to around 16,000 years ago, and that is the time when there are also the first frequentations in the Valley. From that moment someone sees that the power of the image engraved on the rock that remains over time is such that all the communities that follow engrave the rocks, and leave from time to time, however, evidence of their way of life, their technologies, so we can say today that the red thread that runs through the history of the Camonica Valley is precisely rock art, an element of identity.

We obviously think that rock art should be seen throughout the year, because it is not just subject matter for schools to visit from spring until the end of school and then in September and October: rock art is a slow art, interacting with natural light. Think that the best times for scholars to study rock art and document it are the periods from December and January to February: the light is lower on the horizon and so suddenly the light ray animates these surfaces. They are sandstone surfaces, Permian sandstone, their history begins even earlier, 270 thousand years ago, and the Oglio glacier that shaped them, turned them into smooth surfaces, leaves the valley between 25 thousand and 15 thousand years ago.

How do we operate within the Naquane Park? We operate through conservation actions. Which means for us, for example, the constant maintenance of the greenery: when we talk about balance we can also talk about the balance between nature and the archaeological context, because obviously we are inside a forest, a forest that is made of oaks, hornbeams, birches. The forest moves by its nature, but he moves in such a way that it is not always in tune with the rock art, so we have activated a series of collaborations with forestry bodies, for example with the Adamello Park, which prepares for us the plans also of landscape reorganization, and instead, as far as the issue of conservation is concerned, we proceed with ordinary and extraordinary maintenance through collaborations with universities, for example the University of Turin with the department of biology and life sciences.

Obviously we work to make people aware of the richness of this heritage and its elements, its components through education and the telling of a millennial history that starts from the end of the Upper Paleolithic and goes through all the ages up to the time of the Romans: another museum tells about the encounter between the Camuni and the Romans, and when we talk about Camuni we talk about that population that inhabits the valley and lives in the valley in the first millennium before Christ, in the Iron Age. Eighty percent of the rock art in the Camonica Valley is made in that period: we know the name of the Camuni because because it is engraved on the monument in La Turbie, France, erected by Emperor Augustus between 7 and 6 B.C., where he lists all the defeated populations in the Alpine arc, and in second place are the Camuni. This we can recount either starting from the Roman period going back in time, or starting from ancient prehistory and going through all the eras of this millennial history.

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