Parco Comunale Archeologico e Minerario di Sellero

Sellero binds two valley stories on one mountainside: rocks engraved from the Neolithic onward, among them the largest Rosa Camuna known, and a mining landscape worked from the Iron Age to the twentieth century. Its engraved rocks and former mines preserve the area's long history of art and industry.

Why it matters

Established in 2008 through the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici's Valcamonica department, this municipal park was conceived as a double narrative — four rock-art sites joined with the mining district of Carona. Its engravings begin in the late fourth and early third millennium BC, pause through the Copper and Bronze Ages, and return with force in the first millennium BC, when Iron Age carvers filled the quartz-veined rock with warriors. Mining here is attested from that same Iron Age and shaped the valley's economy into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the Carona mines above the town stayed in use until 1951. The park brings prehistoric art and industrial heritage together in one landscape.

What to notice

Carpène preserves about twenty engraved surfaces. Rocks 2 and 3 include a geometric figure interpreted by scholars either as a female idol or as a topographic map, and a walking figure known as the viandante, sometimes identified with the Celtic god Esus. The site also contains what is described as the largest known engraved Rosa Camuna. Rocks 1 and 4 depict Iron Age warriors on foot and on horseback, including one rider standing upright on the horse. The large rose-like solar symbol is a distinctive example of this motif in the valley's rock art.

Context and history

The mountainside entered the literature in the 1930s, but systematic study only began in the 1980s, when the municipality asked the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici to investigate the slopes above the torrente Re. Decades of survey and excavation defined the four engraving sites and documented the mining complex at Carona, northwest of Sellero at around 800 metres of elevation, where tunnels, galleries and workers' quarters survive from a working life that ran from the late nineteenth century back to the Iron Age evidence below. The minerals exploited include iron, copper, chalcopyrite, quartz and calcium carbonate — a catalogue that explains why extraction, not farming, anchored this stretch of the valley. The park was established in 2008, bringing the area's engraved rocks and industrial mines together as a single heritage landscape.