The Grotta of the Genovese

A dream that lasts 14,000 years

by Federica Soprani

I had a dream, which was not a dream.

I walked across a vast plain, the wind bending the tall grass, waving it like a green tide. As far as my eyes could reach, there was only that swaying sea, among the waves of which grazed on placid herbivores and majestic deer. Beyond the horizon the violet shadows of high mountains rose like sleeping giants. But they were not mountains. They were islands, or they would become, a thousand and a thousand years later.

No one could have ever imagined what immortal secret hid the Levanzo heart of stone!

There was a time when Levanzo and Favignana were not islands, but limestone plateaus to the far west of a larger Sicily than we are used to. A large grassy plain divided them from the place where now stands Trapani, that plain that, covered by water in prehistoric times, has been transformed by magic into the valleys of posidonia that make up the depths of this arm of the sea.

My dream lives again in the Grotta del Genovese, which opens like a wound in the rocky side of Levanzo.

An enigmatic place, which offers an invaluable testimony of prehistory in Sicily. The walls of the cave, in fact, are covered with graffiti dating back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic, which not only highlight the presence of man in these lands, since those remote times, but also that of animals typical of the plains, as it would be impossible to conceive today, evaluating the morphology of the Egadi.

There was a time when Levanzo and Favignana were not islands, but limestone plateaus to the far west of a larger Sicily than we are used to.

The Cervus elaphus, the Bos primigenius and the Equus hydruntinus have been running after thousands of years on the walls of the Grotta del Genovese, and men and women carved into the stone dance to the sound of music that we can only imagine, the faces covered by bird head masks.

Other men and women, made of soot and ocher and blood, tell us a story just recently, when Levanzo and Favignana were already islands, and the tuna ran free the currents of the swirling sea. And of a tuna we see the shape, painted on the walls of the cave, to testify that even then the inhabitants of the island practiced fishing for these superb animals, millennia before the slaughter.

A place of meeting and worship, the Grotta del Genovese, inhabited by men between 12,000 and 6,000 years before Christ, discovered by chance by a Florentine tourist, Francesca Minellono, in 1949. For centuries the inhabitants of the island had gone down there just to capture the rabbits, who had made their kingdoms underground. No one could have ever imagined what immortal secret hid the heart of Levanzo stone!

Today the cave can be visited, crossing the island by off-road, or by bicycle, and descending along a rocky path overlooking the sea, among caper bushes and myrtle and strawberry trees, or docking at the Cala del Genovese and climbing the rock cliff limestone.

An unforgettable experience, from which those who visit Levanzo must not really be deprived.

Thousands of years of history, in a blink of an eye. In the space of a dream.

(photo of the inside of the cave from http://www.grottadelgenovese.it)

Look the VIDEO: LA GROTTA DEL GENOVESE A LEVANZO.

 

Taste & Knowledge

Voci da Favignana
by Umberto Rizza
Landscapes and tastings
by Guido Conti
A different view
by Manuela Soressi