Alle radici d’Europa Dieci millenni d'arte rupestre in Valcamonica e nelle Alpi Centrali

Forty years after Valcamonica was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list, as the first Italian monument, this volume offers an up-to-date view of Camunian rock art and the Central Alps. The rock cycles of the area, from the Epipaleolithic to the historical age, are presented in six chronological chapters, setting them with particular care in the continental culture of the different eras and the symbolic features that, step by step, characterized this culture.

The prehistoric rock art of Valcamonica and the Central Alps is a heritage of extraordinary historical and archaeological value. There are over 300,000 such carvings made in the rock over the last ten millennia. They depict human, zoomorphic, symbolic and fantastic figures and everyday implements, in a narrative of the lives of the communities.

The volume is the result of the author’s 45 years of experience in the field, accompanied by an introduction by Emmanuel Anati, the founder and director of the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici and a leading figure in the field of the archeology of rock art. The whole is configured as a very special text on the rocks that are the true record of the succession of eras and communities throughout the Alpine area. This Alpine rock art context is the largest in Europe, one of the most important in the world and is revealing, more than any other, unfathomable aspects of the continental past.