Riserva Naturale Incisioni Rupestri di Ceto, Cimbergo e Paspardo

Across the Valcamonica villages of Ceto, Cimbergo and Paspardo lies a protected reserve of roughly 300 hectares, with more than 500 engraved rocks bearing images from the late Neolithic through the historical period.

Why it matters

This is one of the largest protected areas devoted to rock art in Valcamonica, and it sits inside the territory inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979 as the first Italian site of any kind. The reserve spans the municipalities of Ceto, Cimbergo and Paspardo, and its twenty-five archaeological areas preserve carvings from the fifth millennium BC to the late Middle Ages. Campanine holds a notable concentration of engravings from the end of the Roman period through the modern era. Paspardo preserves warrior figures often taller than a metre, a distinctive scale in the middle valley.

What to notice

Foppe di Nadro contains densely engraved surfaces with Bronze Age daggers and halberds and Middle Iron Age warriors. Three reconstructions of prehistoric houses stand on a nearby terrace. At Campanine di Cimbergo, rock shelves preserve engravings from the late Neolithic and later periods, including post-Roman and medieval imagery. Paspardo contains warrior figures, expanded-blade axes from the Late Iron Age, a monumental Copper Age composition and frequent topographic figures, which some scholars interpret as maps of land or settlement.

Context and history

The reserve was created by Lombardy regional law in 1983 and is run today by a public-law institution that grew out of a consortium of the three municipalities established in 1988; its statute commits it to work with the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici on all scientific questions of research and protection. That pairing of nature reserve and archaeology shapes the whole site: along with the carved heritage, the institution manages the reserve's woodland and its ethnographic legacy, from rural terraces to the historic centres of the three villages. The broader frame is the UNESCO inscription of 1979, which recognised the valley's more than 140,000 figures under criteria covering both the eight-thousand-year testimony of the carvings and their figurative documentation of prehistoric thought.