The Ciota Ciara opens on the slopes of Monte Fenera, at 670 metres, and in the local speech the name simply means light cave. It is the most important evidence of the Middle Palaeolithic in Piedmont: here Neanderthal man left tools, the remains of meals and, for a few years now, his own teeth as well.
What to see
The deposit is made of layers, and every layer is a piece of climate. The Mousterian stone industries are worked almost entirely on raw material gathered nearby, flint and quartz, which tells us that whoever stayed in the cave did not go far to find it. Along with the tools came the remains of Pleistocene mammals: cave bear and brown bear, chamois, red deer, wild boar, and the small mammals, voles and dormice, which are the best thermometers an archaeologist has. The cave also holds traces of much later use, in late Roman and early medieval times, perhaps by a monastic community.
Visiting
Occasional digs in the Fenera caves began in 1951 and the systematic study of the Ciota Ciara in the 1960s; since 2009 the cave has been a worksite of the University of Ferrara, which in 2020 and 2021 recovered three teeth of a young individual: a second lower incisor, a molar and a fragment of a first upper incisor. The entrance is normally closed off to protect the deposit, but the cave can be reached from the path network of the Monte Fenera nature park.
Our editors' tip
Before going up, call at the museum of archaeology and palaeontology in Borgosesia: the Fenera material is there and at the Museo di Antichità in Turin, and seeing the tools before the rock face changes the walk. On the dating it is worth being precise: the university places the central part of the deposit at around three hundred thousand years, and the use of the cave between that threshold and some thirty-five thousand years ago, with the radiometric analyses entrusted to the natural history museum in Paris and not yet complete when the announcement was made.