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La Vecchia Napoli pizzeria, Ventimiglia
Map to the beach
Ventimiglia
San Remo's Matuta?Balzi Rossi caves
Situated on the Mediterranean's Italian Riviera, just east of Menton and the French-Italian border, the caves are at the southern limit of the hilly massif of the Alps, which extends to the sea along the coast, separating the Italian territory of Liguria to the east from Provence and the basin of the Rhône River in France to the west. This particular topography meant that the Balzi Rossi caves were en route - as well as a convenient stopping point - for those who traveled through or lived in this region over the millennia. During the Upper Paleolithic period, the obstacle of the Alpine glaciers made a stop at the caves obligatory. The Gravettians (creators of the figurines) inhabited the caves, by their predecessors in an earlier Palaeolithic age and by their successors in more recent epochs.
Documents from the period and more recent discoveries confirm that the Balzi Rossi held traces of a long series of occupations: the caves were inhabited first by the Mousterians or Neanderthals over 35,000 years ago, during the Middle Palaeolithic period, and later by a succession of cultures - Aurignacian, Gravettian and Epigravettian, during the Upper Palaeolithic period.
The Grotta del Principe yielded a fragment of thing bone belonging to a pre-Neanderthal woman who walked erect. This is the oldest human fragment ever found in Italy. The famous 'triple burial', the skeletons of a Cro-Magnon adult male, girl and young boy, was discovered in the Barma Grande.
Between 1883 and 1895, Louis Alexandre Jullien discovered fifteen figurines at the Balzi Rossi. This is the largest series ever found in one place in Western Europe, and the pieces can be traced back to the Gravettian chronology and culture. Seven of the figurines were displayed in an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Ottawa) in 1995.
