Duration: Full day (6-8 hours)
Level: Medium

Meeting point: Capo di Ponte railway station

Distance covered: 13 km 

Elevation change: 450 m 

Type of path: Mixed: paved and unpaved

Recommended clothing: Waterproof jacket

Recommended footwear: Lightweight boots or hiking boots

Recommended equipment:

Lunch: Bring a packed lunch

Price: € 15 *Custom pricing available for groups

Minimum number of participants: 10

Type of event:
Description:

This trip takes you to rock-art sites near Capo di Ponte that are much less visited than the two National Parks (see our itinerary “Rock art National Parks of Capo di Ponte”) but that contain some fascinating images and and are presented in a more “natural” way than the Naquane Park with its fences etc. We will also visit two non rock-art sites.

We begin with a walk from the Capo di Ponte railway station, through the village, across the river and then up a track to our first (non rock-art) destination – the Romanesque Pieve of San Siro.  This small Romanesque church, built directly onto bedrock, has a beautifully carved doorway and a series of reasonably well-preserved frescoes.

A brief few hundred metres after San Siro we reach the Seradina-Bedolina rock-art park.  Here we will visit 5 or 6 of the most important rocks, seeing images of warriors, deer hunting, granaries and some inscriptions in an alphabet that the Camuna people adopted from the Etruscans to  give their language a written form.  The most impressive of the  carved rocks is without doubt Seradina II, Rock 12.  Here, a quite steeply sloped rock surface is decorated with many hundreds of figures including, along with the usual humans and animals, an Iron Age ploughing scene.

We then climb to the upper part of the park where we will see the so-called Bedolina map and its larger but as yet less well-known companion, discovered within the last decade or so. The “map” appears to show fields, pathways and houses and is probably linked to important changes in the way that people thought about the land.

We will eat our picnic lunches near the Bedolina map and then continue up a narrow road to the small village of Pescarzo.  There we will see the remains of a house lived in by Camuna people and then take a walk in the country to reach the dramatically situated – high above the valley floor with a stupendous view – but almost never visited site of Le Crus.  Here we will see many images of granaries, a rare image of a cart and some more recent imagery – medieval and later.

We then have a walk downhill back to Capo di Ponte and the railway station.

Some photos of our itinerary:

 

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