Grotta del Genovese

Inside a limestone cliff on Levanzo, the Grotta del Genovese preserves some of Sicily's most important prehistoric art: engraved aurochs and deer from the end of the last Ice Age, and painted figures from late Neolithic farming communities.

Why it matters

The Grotta del Genovese documents two distant moments of human presence inside a single hillside. In its deeper chamber, hunters of the final Palaeolithic engraved the large animals of a warming world on bare rock; thousands of years later, communities of the late Neolithic came back to paint idol figures and stylised human shapes in black pigment. Italy's regional tourism authority singles the cave out among prehistoric sites of international interest, and it remains a reference point for the study of Sicilian prehistory more than seventy-five years after its discovery in 1949. Its engravings and paintings are an important part of the archaeological record of the western Mediterranean.

What to notice

The cave's opening lies roughly thirty metres above the sea, on the sheer limestone coast above a small cove called Cala Genovese, half-hidden by Mediterranean scrub. The cave itself splits in two: a broad entrance chamber, the antegrotta, where the remains of a late medieval lime kiln still survive, and a deeper chamber, the retrogrotta, reached through a narrow, low crawl — the very passage through which the art was found.

The retrogrotta contains engravings. Archaeologists have recorded mostly large animals — red deer, aurochs and the wild ass Equus hydruntinus among them — together with four human figures. One standing person wears what reads as a fringed tunic and a distinctive wedge-shaped headdress; two companions seem masked with bird heads, and scholars have long compared these figures with the famous dancers of the Grotta dell'Addaura near Palermo.

The black-painted figures belong to the final phase of the Neolithic: they include fourteen small idols — six shaped like a violin or a flask, eight cylindrical — plus elongated, strongly stylised human forms. A single figure painted in red is attributed to the Palaeolithic on stylistic grounds, close in character to the engraved personages beside it.

Context and history

The cave is karst, hollowed out of the white limestone that builds the whole island. Islanders knew the entrance as a good spot from which to hunt rabbits, but nobody had pushed through the cramped passage into the inner chamber until 1949, when Francesca Minellono, a Florentine painter spending a short holiday on Levanzo, crawled in on her stomach and found the walls covered in figures. She alerted Paolo Graziosi of the Institute of Human Paleontology at the University of Florence and Jole Bovio Marconi, then superintendent of antiquities for western Sicily. Scientific work followed quickly: the wall art was traced onto film, stratigraphic excavations were opened, and other caves on Levanzo and Favignana were surveyed. The engravings are assigned to the final phase of the Upper Palaeolithic, the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, when the climate shifted and hunting communities broadened into fishing and shellfish gathering. The black paintings belong to the closing centuries of the Neolithic, when agriculture and herding were established everywhere and metallurgy lay just ahead.