Caverna delle Arene Candide, Finale Ligure historical timeline

This cave has been dug for more than a century and a half, and the thing that made it famous came out of the middle of that. It was known locally as the Grotta dei Frati long before it was an archaeological site; it acquired its present name, and its scientific career, from a single visit in 1864. The wartime and post-war campaigns in the south-eastern part of the cavern produced the nineteen burials and the stratigraphy, and everything since has been about conservation and access rather than excavation. What a visitor stands in today is a cleared, consolidated cavern with a laid-out route through it — and the guided visit retraces the hundred and fifty years of digging as much as the twenty-six thousand of burial.

Chronology

1. 1864 Arturo Issel visits the cavern in June. The visit gives the cave its present name — until then it was locally the Grotta dei Frati or Armassa — and begins a long season of excavation and research that the guided visit still retraces.
2. early 1920s The coastal dune of white sand at the foot of the cliffs below, which gave the cave its name, is gone by the early years of the decade. The name now records a landform a visitor cannot see.
3. 1940 Luigi Bernabò Brea, first Soprintendente alle antichità della Liguria, and Luigi Cardini of the Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana begin excavating the south-eastern portion of the cavern, working through to 1942. The section they cut is the one that carries the whole sequence.
4. 1948 The two resume, running to 1950. These campaigns are what brought the cave international fame: the nineteen Palaeolithic burials, the Giovane Principe's grave, and a stratigraphy running from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Byzantine era.
5. 2018 The site, the property of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, is entrusted to the Comune di Finale Ligure and the Museo Archeologico del Finale. The museum at the Chiostri di Santa Caterina has run the visits since.
6. 2019 After works to make the cave safe and to lay out a visit route, a regular opening to the public begins in July. It is why the cave can be entered at all, and the route walked today is the one those works created.

Where the finds went

The cave is the one thing that stayed. Material from the excavations is spread across three museums: the Museo di archeologia ligure at Pegli in Genoa, which holds the Giovane Principe himself; the Museo archeologico del Finale at Finalborgo, which also runs the visits; and the Museo nazionale preistorico etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome. The comune's own account adds that the finds of the wider Finalese — from the Caverna della Pollera, one of the largest in the province, which yielded Neolithic pottery with quadrilobate mouths, and from the Arma delle Manie, a seat of Neanderthal man — are in the archaeological museum too. So a visit here and a visit there are two halves of one thing, which is the argument for the combined ticket. The nearby Caverna delle Fate, in the Arma delle Manie, produced Upper and Middle Palaeolithic material and is closed to visits.

• Wikipedia