Parco Archeologico Nazionale dei Massi di Cemmo

Two colossal boulders lie below the cliff above the Plemmo stream. Their carved animals, carts and ploughs brought early attention to Valcamonica rock art. The site preserves the valley's oldest known sanctuary.

Why it matters

In 1909 the young geographer Gualtiero Laeng reported the engraved boulders of Cemmo — the first recorded mention of rock engravings anywhere in Valcamonica, the discovery that began the valley's rise to UNESCO inscription in 1979. The two boulders, precipitated from the cliff behind them at the start of the Holocene after the glacier that polished them withdrew, anchor a Copper Age megalithic sanctuary: after both boulders were engraved, the ground around them was ritually delimited by three plough furrows and crowded with additional standing stones. Excavations traced the site's life across millennia — from Mesolithic activity around the ninth millennium BC, through the sanctuary's Copper and Bronze Age splendour, to its deliberate dismantling in the Christian era, when stelae were toppled into large pits.

What to notice

Masso 1 carries more than 150 engravings, including stags with vast branched antlers, chamois with short hooked horns, ibex, wild boar, canids, bovids, daggers and a ploughing scene. Masso 2 depicts ibex and does, wolf packs, a dog with raised tail, an axe, a halberd and daggers, as well as a four-wheeled cart with solid wheels and a plough, images of third-millennium-BC transport technology. The furrow lines once enclosed the sacred space; a Bronze Age wall is 2.50 metres wide at its base, and hollows mark where broken stelae were discarded. More than twenty original carved stelae from the sanctuary are preserved at MUPRE.

Context and history

The site's research biography mirrors Italian archaeology itself. After Laeng's 1909 report, systematic study waited until Emmanuel Anati's campaigns for the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici in 1962; the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Lombardia took over from the early 1980s, and the final investigations preceded the park's inauguration in October 2005. Excavation rewrote the site's chronology: frequentation in the early Mesolithic, renewed in the Recent Neolithic, the great Copper Age sanctuary with its added stelae, a Bronze Age enclosure wall, an Iron Age restructuring spanning roughly the fifth to first centuries BC, and continued Roman-era presence before Christianization ended the cult. Managed within the state museum system with Naquane and MUPRE, the park is one of the eight public zones of UNESCO site n. 94.