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Zimilina-Molinello-Androla
The Etruscan-Celtic path, the first part of which
is presented in this paper, blends harmoniously with the nature
trail of Valsaviore (Saviore Valley) put together by the Adamello
Park. The path came into being thanks to the joint work of many
people, but among them we want to remember firstly those who left
us and who were close to us, lovingly since the first steps, sharing
the enthusiasm of the first finds.
Let’s remember Donatella Salvetti Danesi, who worked with
passion and constance to put the first finds in order, seeking
a unifying logic and the literature references, to place them
into a context that was identified with an ancient cultural climate.
Her work from the stones reached the mind and the heart. Let’s
remember general Domenico Scoppio, a man of rare sensitivity,
experienced Etruscologist, who knowingly led the researches, supporting
us with his culture and his unquestionable insight. Let’s
remember Giovan Battista Matti, the guardian of many local legends
and traditions. To Lorenzo Cervelli, his long-time friend, just
before dying he related of a little bird who visited him and he
called “Raì”. “Raì twittered when
I arrived, it was happy. More so was I. I entrusted Raì
with my thoughts. Raì would fly in the sky and sing. And
now, too, he will wait for me singing ... I myself am ready to
fly ... high, forever.
To these friends of ours, who fly high and look upon us, to use
a Celtic image from the Sidhe, let’s turn our minds, knowing
they are following us from another dimension, step by step, on
the... path.
The association “Amici del sentiero etrusco celtico”
Presentation
Gabriele Rosa writes that the “early travellers who ascended
to the the Alps from the south must have been of Ligurian and
Iberian lineage, whose ancestors really were the Basque from the
Pyrenees, while from the Black Sea came up the Finnish people.
Such mixture of Ligurians and Finns in the Alps was met by the
Celts, who introduced sheep-farming and simple agriculture and
some early cognizance of iron, as well as Umbrians and Etruscans
refugees from the great Celtic invasion of the sixth century B.C.
Umbrian and Etruscan traders and labourers had come up along the
Po and the Oglio rivers to lake Sebino, and due to the Celtic
rush many fled, either to the Appennins or to the Alps, where,
mingling with the former inhabitants, but keeping in separate
groups, they made up those people that were called Rhaetians.”
“In the Pyrenees – again from Rosa’s writings
– the seat of the Basque, are found the names Camu, Camudas,
whence the alleged Ligurian origin of the name Camunians.”
The Camunians and their history, writes Anati, cover a time span
of “eight thousand years, during which the gatherers-hunters
of the Stone Age gradually turned into tribes with ever more complex
activities and structures, to the point of becoming entities of
many characteristics familiar to us. When, after the evolution
of four hundred generations, they became part of the rising Roman
empire, the Camunians were already a nation, possessing a social-economic
structure, and a division of work and classes, which has since
characterized European civilization.”
Throughout the millennia, the Camunians interacted and mingled
with various peoples, among whom stand out the Celts and the Etruscans.
As is well known from plentiful literature on the subject, Val
Camonica is a land filled with evidence of man’s presence
and evolution, but the cartography of the findings cannot be said
to be completed. Cevo, for example, is a town that does not appear
among the sites subjected to research in the latest decades, so
it remained out of the maps that show the distribution of rock
art and, more generally, of archaeological findings. A few years
ago, precisely in 1998, the writer (with his wife, Donatella
Salvetti, and Domenico Scoppio and Franca Leonardi) was one of
the discoverers of some important finds that may put the Cevo
area, from the Androla hill and a vast territory from the Androla
area to the Molinello site, on a par with great cult sites and
astronomic observatories. Over the years the research has gone
on. In the meantime the group “Amici del sentiero etrusco
celtico” (Friends of the Etruscan-Celtic path) has formed
with the aim of deepening and publicizing the researches.
Thanks to the unfaltering commitment of the “Amici del sentiero
etrusco celtico” and in particular of Lorenzo Cervelli,
new finds have emerged and we publish them here, fully aware that
what is written here is provisional, as the research is ongoing
and the interpretation of the finds is in progress.
Cevo, whose inhabitants dub themselves “Barolcc” (People
of the high fields or of the summits) is, as the name indicates
(keb = height), a town at high elevation, that is in a position
overlooking Val Camonica. To the geographic position add the abundance
of water, an excellent exposure to the sun during the whole day,
the presence of fertile grounds, and copper and iron mines. All
of these factors naturally make for a perfect area for human settlement.
And so it was, from ancient-most times, whence we are now getting
important archaeological, historical and cultural evidence.
In this first book, edited by the “Amici del sentiero etrusco
celtico” we give an account of some findings that on the
whole point to the presence of a vast settled area starting from
the Neolithic and continuing in successive periods, with Celtic
and Etruscan marks. In particular we identified a path that links,
not only physically, the north-west section of Androla (where
an engraving was found representing Lug in the most archaic form
of Carnos) to the Molinello area to the east, where a megalithic
complex has been discovered. [see MAP]
Lug and the Cult of the Bull
Of great interest is a graffito found north-west of the Androla
hill, representing the god Lug in its archaic form of Cranos or
Carnos, associated to the bull.
The horned symbols (horns of cows, deer, goats) appear in the
dolmenic world in Britain from the fourth millennium B.C. Such
signs – Jean Prieur writes about them – are found
plentifully in the form of rock engravings in the Alpine sites
of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, in particular in the Valley
of Marvels around Mt. Bego (Maritime Alps, French slope) in which
the bull prevails, and in Val Camonica (Brescia) where the deer-like
figures are numerous”.
About this Myriam Philibert writes (“Les Mytes préceltiques”,
ed. Rocher): “The deer and the bull in the Palaeolithic
appear to be sacred animals. After the post-glacial heating, they
keep their mythical value ... At the same time, the cows split
into two species: a small-sized ox, with short horns, which gets
domesticated, and the urus, much bigger, that remains wild and
gets hunted. On wall paintings the animal appears with big, lyre-shaped
horns. In a leap of schematic design, the horns alone may represent
it. Many associations are known to exist, with the Moon, the snake,
the Earth, the staff of the Goddess, or the weaving lines of water
and the boat. And now the famous root KRN appears, which we find
in Carnac and which comes from KR? The root KR or KL seems to
precede the Indo European and means “stone”. The final
N suggests an idea of elevation.”
Many are the examples of terms deriving from the root Kr or Kl
or both with the final N. Many also the gods. Among them, “Carnos
(or Cranos) equates – Myriam Philibert writes – the
god of the herds. On Cypriot bronzes he appears with his forehead
bedecked by bull’s horns. Subsequently he will turn into
Apollo.” In the Carnac region we find Corneille. “Carnos
or Corneille – Myriam Philibert maintains – are pastoral
gods with their staff. We like to imagine the former as a good-looking
lover of Mother Earth. The western Neolithic cultures, Cretan
and Minoan, value cows as peers of Mother Earth and also as lunar
epiphany”. “At times – Myriam Philibert writes
again – this horned god has a feminine polarity, whenever
it appears in the form of a vase-like pair of open horns, and
is opposed to the dagger: the masculine inheritor, on the stylistic
level, of the arrow. Then the horned god evidently represents
the third function, linked to nourishment, femininity and the
earth. It is the protector of farmers and brings to mind the Grecian
Cranos, god of the herds, before acquiring a solar character”.
With the arrival of the Indo Europeans and of patriarchal society,
the god-bull, more or less androgynous, fades out of the scene.”
Thus, we are facing the cult of the bull until, with the arising
solar cults and the beginning of the era of Aries, the god-deer
takes its place. “Carnos-Bull stands as a peer of the Mother
Goddess, in her role of goddess of sexuality and fertility, as
in the Palaeolithic. Then he represents a certain image of immortality.
... The deer, like the sun, stands for periodic renewal, or the
cycles of life, death, rebirth, in the vegetative, animal, human
or divine sphere.”
The deer antlers, as Jean Prieur remarks, changing with every
seasonal cycle, are a symbol of rebirth.
Finally, the Kernunnos. After the Neolithic Bull and the deer
of the Bronze Age, in the age of the Pisces we find Kernunnos,
with a most significant version appearing in Val Camonica, with
a torques (“the mark of power and the numinous at once”,
and the act of lifting it is “a sacred gesture”)
in the right hand and a ram-headed snake (“symbol of reproductive
fertility”) in the left hand.
From the possible presence of the cult of the bull at Cevo, Lorenzo
Cervelli reports a tale, according to which the local population
worshipped a “golden ox” (over the centuries there
has been a symbolic overlap between the bull and the Sinaic idol)
that the people coming from the valley below (the Christians)
wanted to destroy. For this reason the “golden ox”
was hidden on the mountain (today named Dorino) and was entrusted
to some guardians (the ancient religion has fled to the mountains).
Still according to legend, when from the valleys came the people
who set everything on fire, the “golden ox” was buried
(the ancient religion is now kept underground) and its custodians
went away along a route now marked by many crosses (obviously
a form of exorcism of the previous cults).
The cult of the bull is now little known. In the Celtic world
a white bull was slaughtered under particular circumstances and
its meat was cooked in a cauldron. That meat was used to nourish
a druid, who received a dream that night with useful information
for the tribe (the election of a king, the outcome of a battle,
the fate of a clan, etc.).
In the “Book of Ulster” a tale is handed down from
at least the 8th century, where Conn, to break a geis that binds
him to a woman in the afterlife, seeks a child born of a guilt-less
couple. In the moment when the sacrifice is going to be accomplished,
“a woman comes with a cow. The woman says: “Here is
what you must do: kill the cow and blend its blood with the soil
of Ireland, in front of Tara’s doors... When the cow will
be dead, the two stomachs must be opened. Inside two birds are
found, one with a lone paw, the other with twelve paws”.
We are witnessing a sacrifice with a substitute victim, but in
relation with a bull cult of which we know nothing. Is it the
famous bull of the three cranes (the crane, suggests Jean Prieur,
is a symbol of wisdom and supervision) depicted in the Gallo-Roman
statuary art? Whatever the case, the cow gets killed and the flying
birds fight; the bird with the lone paw prevails”.
Hadingham quotes Norman Lokyer’s theory, according to
which in 2002 B.C. existed a “Cult of May”, linked
to the first of May, thus to Aldebaran, that was suppressed around
1600 B.C. by worshippers of the solstice, or of the Sun, coming
from Egypt or Greece.
The “Cult of May” people venerated the sorb and the
blackthorn prune, while the worshippers of the sun the mistletoe.
The “Cult of May” gives origin to a calendar that
divides the year into eight parts: the solstices and equinoxes,
the first of May, the first of November, the first of August and
the first of February. This brings to mind Aldebaran (Bull) and
Antares (Scorpio): the one opposing the other in the zodiac.
But who is Lug? It is the Celtic Apollo-Mercury, and its origin,
as Jean Markale points out, dates back to the hyperborean myth,
that is to that “mythical country of the Hyperboreans, within
which perhaps resides the memory of the builders of the megaliths”
that are found “in Celtic mythology in the aspect of the
underground race of the Tuatha Dé Danann (the people
of the goddess Dana), the first to settle in Ireland.
Interesting in this respect is Jean Markale’s remark about
Cûchulainn (Setanta), the son of Lug and Dechtaire, the
sister of king Conchobar: “His physical strength and his
courage are linked symbolically to the bull. After all, the name
Tarani (a Celtic god) is juxtaposed to the name tarvos (bull).
... Here is a confused mingle of totemic memories and relics of
an ancient religion of the bull”.
The finding of the horned god below Androla represents, then,
a very important element for the study of the Cevo area.
The Androla Hill
The Androla hill appears from many points of view as a likely
cult site and a vantage astronomic point.
The evidence supporting such hypothesis is manifold, starting
with the geographic location. The hill is in fact in such a position
as to allow a person standing on its summit to dominate the valley
and have a view of 360° around all the surrounding mountains.
This aspect makes for a natural viewpoint both for defensive purposes
and for astronomic uses (star, moon, solar observations). The
early research pointed this way in the attempt to identify revealing
signs of accomplishments related to the measuring of time, seasonal
changes, and the movements of the heavens.
The existence of likely relics of boulders arranged in circular
form is gathered by the aerial photograph of the hill, and is
further confirmed by an initial prospect of the area around the
little church that rises on top of the Androla hill.
On the summit a stone was visible (now removed due to the digs
for the positioning of a huge cross) that was perfectly aligned
to the south and east-west. The stone was triangular (tetrahedral).
The selfsame church located on the summit is an indirect testimony
of the former use of the Androla hill as an observatory. The ancient-most
art of the edifice is in fact a square-base building, with four
openings facing the four cardinal points.
The little church further introduces to the ancient cults of the
Androla. The first part of the building was in fact built where
the local beliefs indicate the witches’ gathering place.
D.A. Morandini writes about this: “According to an old-time
tradition, under the Androla chapel existed some copper pits,
called “ramine”. The Androla chapel is possibly the
best viewpoint of the entire Val Camonica. Once the copper mines
were exhausted and abandoned, deep and scary tunnels remained
untouched. Well, those folks imagined the existence of a snake
with a golden ring, that no one ever dared approach because its
stare was thwarting. In addition, witches were said to inhabit
those tunnels. These fantastic, fearsome creatures came out of
their underground dwellings during the raging storms, and under
hailing rains they performed eerie round dances on the Androla
meadows”.
Copper pits and dancing witches during the “raging storms”
may be connected, insofar as still today witnesses refer that
the Androla hill is often stricken by abundant lightning. The
fact that the hill attracts thunderbolts (the dancing witches?)
is evidently related to the presence of quarries or mines of metal
bearing minerals.
As for the presence of stone circles from time immemorial all
over the world, Colin Wilson refers the opinion of an archaeologist,
Lethbrdge, who maintains that “the great aim was the accomplishment
of magic, which took place during the witches’ rituals,
and their way to achieve it was simply the trick of provoking
strong communal excitement. The stone circles on our hills and
the frenzied dances of the witches had this large purpose. And
so it was worldwide in an ancient past. Magic power was generated
by those dances and – so it was believed – it was
contained and directed to its target by the stone circles themselves,
arranged so as to keep the power in control and to avoid dispersion
all around the country”.
The name Androla may derive from antrum, pit, grotto or cave.
The same derivation seems to apply also to Andrista, the town
that lies below Androla, reachable from the hill by a steep trail
that borders the pits or copper mines, supposedly inhabited by
the witches.
Andrista = Antrum istum = this pit
Androla = Antrum illum = that pit.
The witches, according to tradition, kept the snake with the golden
ring inside the Androla caves. The snake is an element of great
importance for the study of local traditions and for the identification
of possible ancient cults. The snake is an animal related to the
earth and, consequently, to the Mother Goddess. “Penetrating
the depths of the earth, the snake seizes its secrets and becomes
the bearer of science and wisdom”.
At Andrista the tradition of the Basilisk is still alive. Angelo
Moreschi (writing for “Giornale di Brescia”) describing
the rite that takes place at Andrista on January 5th, speaks of
the “Badilisc” as a hairy snake sporting a big head,
two huge eyes and a gigantic mouth. From such mouth exit the most
important facts of the year, after a procession that takes the
“monster” around the streets of the town. The whole
thing (the “talk of the Badilisc”) is offered to public
mockery. The Badilisc is described as a snake endowed with bovine
horns and a goatskin head, born out of an egg laid by an old cock
and bred by a poisonous toad. In some representations the basilisk
has a cock’s head and a snake’s tail.
It is worth remembering that Kernunnos is represented with deer
antlers, holding a ram-headed snake and a torques (golden
ring?).
The figure of the cold-headed snake, as Prieur remarks, is widespread
in Gallic regions and represents “at once the strength and
the fecundity of the ram, as well as the cyclical renewal of life,
symbolized by the moults of the snake”.
The tradition of the snake with a golden ring is linked to the
snake of the stone, that was spotted in the vicinity of the Antigola
spring. According to legend, the snake of the stone is the one
with a brilliant stone in its mouth.
In this regard it is worth remembering that among the people of
the French and Swiss Alps there are stories of flying snakes or
dragons carrying a stone in the face. At night they fly to the
mountain tops and in the day they take shelter in natural caves.
Following Celtic traditions, the flying serpents grew wings and
as they got old they turned into dragons. Some of the winged dragons
had a lion’s body.
Interesting for geographic proximity and common Alpine context
is the legend of the serpent (dragon) of the Red Horn at Zogno,
in Val Brembana, whom the elderly say they still see flying among
the mountain tops. At night the serpent came out of its burrow
on the Red Horn and started flying above the Zogno basin, holding
in its mouth a golden bowl. It came back to the Red Horn after
pausing to drink water at the ancient Boer fount, near the Inzogno.
The story goes on with the youth of the town who would follow
the snake to the fount, chasing it with a pan to try and snap
the golden bowl; but invariably at the crucial moment they were
petrified.
The snake, which we also find sculptured in a megalithic artefact
in the Molinello area, both as a golden ring serpent and as a
snake with a brilliant stone, is one of the most represented symbolic
elements at Cevo. Because the snake is directly linked to the
cults of the Mother Goddess, and considering the Iberian (Basque)
origin of the so called Celtic-Ligurian people who first populated
Val Camonica, we can’t but find a reference in the ancient
religion of the Basque and their main goddess, Mari, representing
the earth in the form of a very beautiful woman with blond hair
embellished by a golden comb. She was said to live in undergroung
caves, and her par is the snake Maju or Sugaar, god of the earth
and the sky. At times Mari herself, in her lower part, appears
as a snake, in the same way as Ninianae (Viviana, the Lady of
the lake of Arthurian memory) or Dahut (a Breton mermaid goddess).
No one fails to notice an assonance with the Camunian Aquane.
The Aquane are the quiet and kindly dwellers of charming lands,
and they can predict the future and recall the past, though they
don’t recognize the present; they belong in the Celtic cult
of the waters, and in many legends these water spirits, in the
shape of extremely beautiful women, attract humans into the afterlife,
getting them to lose their own sense of time.
These water spirits belong in the land of the fairies, the goddess
Dana, or the Sidhe, a parallel world whose entrances may be found
under hills or near dolmens and springs.
Coran dè la Panéra
To the south of Androla, in the vicinity of Coran dè la
Panéra, a rock with various engravings has been discovered
and is still being studied, together with a human figure engraved
inside a triangle pointing down, found on a nearby rock.
It may be surmised that the first rock represents a plan of the
area. The zigzagging signs, forming lozenges, may stand for water
flows, and the square crossed by various lines could reasonably
indicate a village. Less understandable is the arrangement of
numerous cupmarks.
However, some engravings reported by Priuli, such as those
he calls “the rock of the Drud and the Sorcerer”,
present a possible cultual interpretation of the zigzagging geometric
pattern. As a matter of fact, the anthropomorphic figures in the
two engravings do wear clothes with a repeated lozenge-shaped
pattern.
The lozenge (mâcle, knitting-work), an evident symbol of
the Mother Goddess, evokes universal vital strength; the knitwear
of the Sumerian Great Net, which extends to the whole universe,
is a scheme of the universal vital strength. The agrenon (the
“net” in Greek) represents the expansion that occurs
at once in all directions. The net is found engraved on omphaloid
stones and in the Celtic culture it equates the spiral. The lozenge
net is linked to the checker board, on which Lug sits, made up
of black and white squares, to indicate the polarity of manifestation.
As regards the anthropomorphic figure inscribed in a triangle
pointing downwards, it seems to belong in the Neolithic, according
to the typology of Camunian art presented by E. Anati. It could
be an “orant” (worshipper) with the particular feature
of the triangle pointing down which symbolizes the feminine.
Proceeding on the path we approach the Molinello, where an ancient
stone door (the StrØta), now destroyed, introduced to what
appears to be a large sacred area, probably used for cultual functions
of healing and for astronomic observations.
An old legend marks the spot as a meeting place where ancient
rites took place.
“According to an old tale, once upon a time Tesa also yielded
corn, but on a full moon night some pretty maids gathered there
for their noisy merrymaking and dancing at the light of a big
fire, to meet with a man with horns and tail, who presented himself
around midnight. The town boys were scared by the cries they heard
and the men didn’t know what to do. This happened again
every month on the full moon, but one night in November a man
went to St. Sisto and started to strike the little bell.
The elated pretty maids suddenly stopped dancing and ran toward
the fire, where their lord was awaiting them, but they arrived
late, beaten up and wounded all over. The man seeing them in that
state didn’t want them any more for himself, changed their
feet into goat legs and embalmed them in the Dòsol. After
that, every month the St. Sisto bell gets stricken.
No one knows anything about it. The fields of Tesa have become
fertile and they yield corn as well.”
The legend, told by Giùanù (Giovan Battista Matti)
and reported by Lorenzo Cervelli, is of great interest insofar
as, aside from the Christian interpretation, it tells us of ancient
rites that took place on full moon nights, with frenzied dances
and the intake of intoxicating drinks, around a big fire. The
ritual dances, whose frantic rhythm and the intoxicating drinks
that went along produced states of altered consciousness, allowed
to look beyond our dimension, as still happens today in many shamanic
rites, to enter into other worlds... or the other world, the one
parallel to ours, the Sidhe, that the Celts believed to be a concrete
reality.
Who was the lord? Not an entity, but, as we’d say today,
every participant’s super ego, the projection of the tribe’s
collective unconscious, or that god said Lug, the luminous, who
indeed is represented with horns (or Kernunnos, the sacred deer).
For the Celts this human world is finite, measurable and measured.
The other world, the Sidhe, is the immutable present of reality,
where “I was” equals “I am” and “I
will be”. Meeting with Lug then means acquiring knowledge,
which is what the women priests did in the past, though Christianity
turned all that into witchery. That’s why the women came
out injured (the blows, the wounds), now unable to enter the other
dimension and, for this reason, embalmed by the selfsame Lord
of knowledge, so that their knowledge wouldn’t be used by
the unworthy ones. Embalmed, not suppressed, just like their culture,
that no longer belongs in daily life because we can’t grasp
it, nonetheless it remains written in the stones, told by legends,
living in the symbols.
Il Molinello
Molinello presents itself as a series of overlapping terraces
held up by stone walls. Along the walls there are stones positioned
so as to give the impression of tombs and dolmens, while others
lead to surmising the presence of broken menhirs.
One could presume the existence of a fortified village, but those
settlements were usually protected behind by rocks, so as to leave
only the part toward the flat area of the valley bottom accessible,
still easily defensible.
The terraces are not wide enough to allow for agricultural exploitation.
Behind there are no rocks, but plateaus, where the presence of
megalithic circles is evident.
Besides, south-west of the possible centre and below, near the
buildings currently utilized as stables, there are stones positioned
in such a way that we think they might have been targets to determine
the alignments between the megalithic circles and the vault of
heaven.
Toward the lower section of the stone complex, there is a dolmen
of remarkable make.
In this respect what Jean Markale writes is significant: “We
know the druids were lone people, like hermits residing in the
forests where they celebrated cults shrouded in mystery.
There probably is a survival of the dolmenic religion in all this,
that we don’t know but we can verify checking out the number
of megalithic monuments, mostly dolmens, in Celtic territories.
The hypothesis was brought up that the dolmens were the tombstones
of the priests or missionaries, promulgators of that ancient religion,
who died in an aura of holiness and were worshipped after their
departure. We also know that the myth of the Tuatha Dé
Danann living on hillocks dates back to that time.”
Of great interest is also the discovery of what we will call the
“Astronomer’s stone”, a few metres away from
the target and the stone circles.
The “Astronomer’s stone” reveals itself, after
careful observation, as a scheme that the operator could have
used to watch the sky. The two cupmarks of biggest diameter (approx.
8 centimetres), if united by a straight line, point to the south-east.
This is extremely significant, for in that portion of the sky
we find important asterisms such as Orion, the Canis Major, Sirius,
the Bull, with Aldebaran, the Pleiades.
The fork departing from the central cupmark was, in ancient times,
a tool used to sight the sky to identify the asterisms, the heliacal
rises, the motions of the constellations and of single stars.
The fork is oriented to the east and ends in the central cupmark,
forming with it a vaguely anthropomorphic figure. In the stone
four more cupmarks are also highlighted, three of a three-centimetre
diameter, one of a one-centimetre diameter. They are placed west
of the main cupmark. Let’s imagine now an astronomer of
the time, equipped with his fork, pointing towards the central
cupmark. If he introduces some sticks into the other cupmarks
to the west (south-west and north-west) as targets, he is thus
enabled to watch and test out a vast portion of the western sky.
If on the other hand he turns his gaze to the east, inserting
a stick in the south-east cupmark, he can sight, for instance,
the heliacal rise of Aldebaran, Sirius, and Pleiades. These are
extremely important star references for the ancient world, as
evinced also by extensive literature on the subject, to which
we don’t refer now as it is impossible in these brief notes
to deal adequately with the topic.
The “Astronomer’s stone” thus turns out to be,
in our opinion, a very important find, as it represents an essential
reference point for subsequent archaeo-astronomic observations.
The Ferrous Fount and the Snake
North-west of Molinello there is a ferrous fount.
A series of positioned stones, among which some triangular targets
have been spotted, indicate a sinusoidal route that links Molinello
to the ferrous fount. About half way there is a boulder, obviously
carved, whose shape recalls a snake’s head. Under the head
the boulder makes a prominent stone step. Considering the survival
of legends and feast-days related to the snake, we can’t
rule out the idea that the snake-headed boulder may have been
an altar, placed half way between the megalithic circle and the
ferrous fount, for cultual objects.
The snake’s head, derived from a granite block, faces east
and receives the sun light frontally at the equinoxes. The two
eyes are grazed tangentially by the sun at the summer solstice.
Let us not forget the apotropaic value of the snake and its association,
in many cultures, to healing.
Other Finds
Awaiting further studies, we only hint at other finds, such as
various writings in north Etruscan and a Solomon’s knot,
likely of Roman age, presently set in the dam of Val D’Arno.
The initial phase of the research and the first finds are fruits
of the efforts of Domenico Scoppio, Donatella Salvetti, Silvano
Danesi, Franca Leonardi and Paolo Maglio.
© Texts edited by Silvano Danesi
© The researches have been carried out by Silvano Danesi,
Lorenzo Cervelli and the group “Amici del sentiero etrusco
celtico”
© Photographs by Silvano Danesi and Lorenzo Cervelli
Graphic arts by Giuseppe Romano
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