Val Camonica

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Val Camonica is a valley in the lower Alpine regions of Lombardy, Italy. It is the upper valley of the river Oglio, upstream from Lake Iseo. Most of Val Camonica lies in the northern part of the province of Brescia. It is home to the greatest complex of rock drawings in sub-Alpine Italy, with approximately 250,000 petroglyphs drawn by members of the Camuni tribe on hundreds of exposed rocks dating from about 8000 BC; cosmological, figurative, and cartographic motifs are featured, in some locations forming monumental hunting and ritual `scenes´. The best-known drawings were first discovered in 1909 by Walter Laeng, a Brescian geographer. He announced his finding of two carvings on two boulders on the Pian del Greppe near Cemmo. Since the 1950s, the imagery from thousands of rock surfaces has been `catalogued´, in a vast, on-going project of transcription and classification. In 1979, UNESCO included these samples to its World-wide Patrimony listing of rock art.

It includes scenes of zoophilia.

[edit] External link

• Italian World Heritage Sites