A bit of history

Discovered in 1986 and opened to the public in 2007, the Sanctuary of Minerva is an exceptional park where the beauty and natural sacredness of the place are combined with the monumentality of the Roman intervention preserved in a clearly legible way in the structures.

Under the watchful eye of Minerva, the visitor will be able to retrace the spaces of worship and ritual at the foot of the hill from which the sacred water flowed, as they did two thousand years ago.

The Camonica Valley was conquered by the Roman troops led by the proconsul Publio Silio Nerva in 16 BC, as part of the vast and complex process, already started by the Romans in the second half of the III century BC, which led in two hundred years to the Romanization of the whole Northern Italy.
Civitas Camunnorum, the city of the Camuni, founded in a particularly happy place from a geographical, landscape and climatic point of view, protected by the mountains behind it and overlooking the Oglio river, was a point of reference and aggregation of all the people of the valley and a model advanced of Romanity.

The construction of the monumental sanctuary of Minerva fits into this picture.

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The place

A plateau subject in past centuries to violent floods on the left bank of the Oglio river - which runs through the Camonica Valley for its entire length before entering Lake Iseo (Lacus Sebinus) and constitutes an important link between the Alps to the north and the plain to the south - until a few years ago it hid a place of worship frequented since the Iron Age (6th century BC).

Place of worship that was born around the presence of water in the river and in the springs kept in the caves.

The gushing of water from the earth was in fact felt in ancient times as the epiphany, the manifestation of the divinity with which one could come into direct contact through ceremonial paths and purification rites.

And if in the second Iron Age the Camunian peoples had associated with the water that flowed from the caves a female divinity, personification of the imminent presence of nature in the life of man, the Romans, with the conquest of the territory at the end of the first century BC. , welcomed the religious tradition of the place "reinterpreting it" and entrusting Minerva with the role of titular goddess.

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The archaeological excavation

In 1986, during excavation work for the installation of a sewer system, the bulldozer accidentally cut a mosaic floor.

The start of the investigation revealed a large block of marble, a statue that had been demolished and buried in the earth.

This is the beginning of one of the most interesting archaeological discoveries of our day in northern Italy.

The intervention of the Superintendence for Archaeological Heritage of Lombardy immediately highlighted the extraordinary interest of the site and with the first scientific investigations, the central rooms of a Roman sanctuary and the statue of Greek marble cult of the goddess Minerva, intentionally mutilated and scarred in ancient times with the removal
of the face.

Systematic excavation campaigns followed one another between 1988 and 1995, while the most significant pre-Roman finds date back to 2003: in the courtyard stone structures were found used from the 6th to the 1st century BC by local populations for outdoor rites in honor of an indigenous deity linked to the waters.

A precious testimony of Camunian religious culture, as well as of relations with Italic and Mediterranean traditions, is a bronze pendant depicting a female divinity schematized on a solar boat.

The Roman sanctuary

The Roman sanctuary dedicated to Minerva - a place of worship but also a meeting place, exchange, traffic control - is structured in the Flavian age (69-96 AD) according to the canon of the Italic temple.

The plan follows the scheme of the Tuscan temple outlined by Vitruvius (De Architectura, 27-23 BC) and the models of the imperial Capitolias, in particular the Capitolium of Brixia-Brescia, also built under the emperor Vespasian.

The building consists of a central body, located on a high podium which is accessed via steps, and two porticoed side wings that extend towards the river delimiting a large open courtyard. The ambulatory on the front widens in front of the hall of worship to form a monumental pronaos. The central hall, which houses an elevated niche in the back wall for the statue of Minerva, is frescoed with spirals and fake marble crustae and has a black and white mosaic with geometric motifs as a floor.

Tubs, fountains and statues in the courtyard embellished the entire complex.
The compartment in which the water of the sacred spring flows into a large basin maintains its "natural" characteristics. Drinking water was part of a ceremonial complex that included offerings, sacrifices, banquets and libations, as evidenced by the numerous archaeological materials found in excavations and now preserved in the nearby Civitas Camunnorum National Archaeological Museum in Cividate Camuno.

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The rituals

The nodal point of the rites of sacrifice and offering is the large stone altar, in direct visual connection with the divinity, whose cult statue is located in correspondence with the celestial east.

The statue of Minerva in Greek marble, larger than the natural one, represents a rare example of a cult image found in situ in its sanctuary.

Divinity with multiple attributes - warrior divinity, but also of thought and work, of the fertile earth and rocks, the one who maintains the youth and health of men - combines religious significance with ideological value, representing not only the Roman interpretatio of an older indigenous cult of water, but also the affirmation of the Roman conquest of the territory
Camuno and the control of the new roads opened towards the transalpine provinces.

He wears a chiton and himation and carries the aegis adorned in the center by the gorgoneion on his chest. The head was surmounted by a helmet with a rich crest and decorated with a winged sphinx.

With his left hand he held the spear, while with his right stretched forward he held out the patera (plate) in the gesture of receiving offerings.

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The statue of Minerva

The iconography takes up a famous statuary model of the 5th century BC, that of the Athena Hygieia (Restorer), a now lost bronze work by the Greek sculptor Pirro dedicated on the Acropolis of Athens around 432 BC

The statue of Breno - now on display at the National Archaeological Museum Civitas Camunnorum in Cividate Camuno - is perhaps the oldest of the so far known replicas of the Roman period from historical collections (type of the Athena called "Farnese-Hope", respectively preserved in the Archaeological Museum National Museum of Naples and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California), an image then quickly transmitted to the territories beyond the Alps.