Caverna delle Arene Candide, Finale Ligure site features

It is a wide, bright, dry cavern, which is unusual and is part of why it matters. The cave lies on the upper edge of the west rim of the former Ghigliazza quarry, about 90 m above sea level — its own site record gives 93 — and presents three large openings towards the sea. Those openings make it relatively lit and dry, today as in the past.

The ground conditions are the reason anything survived. The excavations revealed an articulated stratigraphic sequence preserving evidence from the Upper Palaeolithic through to the Byzantine era, in a depositional environment extremely favourable to the good conservation of finds — above all of bone and of burnt material.

The Prince's grave is the set piece. A Gravettian adolescent, athletic, who habitually ate meat, fish and molluscs, dated to about 26,000 years before present — the comune overview says about 24,000 years ago — and described as fifteen years old, or sixteen to seventeen in that same overview. He was found on a layer of red ochre, seven metres below the surface, facing south, with a cap of gilt Nassa shells, ornaments of shell and bone, worked deer antlers and a long flint in his hand. The mortal wound to the chin had been reconstituted with yellow ochre before burial.

And the cap changed an argument. It resembles the contemporary caps found with the Donna di Paglicci and the Donna di Ostuni in Puglia and the Donna di Caviglione at the Balzi Rossi, as well as some figurines — the so-called Signora di Brassempouy among them. The resemblance has led to the hypothesis that these caps were not used solely as funerary objects but were real headgear, worn in life.

The Giovane Principe's grave goods

A cap of gilt Nassa shells, ornaments of shell and bone, worked deer antlers, and a long flint held in the hand — laid on red ochre seven metres down, facing south. The richness of the assemblage is what singled this burial out of the nineteen.

The yellow ochre on the wound

The mortal wound to the chin had been made good with yellow ochre before burial. It is the detail that turns a skeleton into a funeral, and it is the only statement the cave's own record makes about how he died.

Nineteen burials in one cavern

One of the most substantial Palaeolithic funerary complexes anywhere, and the best preserved — because of a depositional environment exceptionally kind to bone and burnt material. The comune's overview counts fifteen individuals instead.

Upper Palaeolithic to Byzantine, in one section

The stratigraphy that Luigi Bernabò Brea and Luigi Cardini cut in the south-eastern part of the cave runs from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Byzantine era without a break. Very few sites in Europe offer that span in one place.

Three openings, and the light

The cavern faces the sea through three large openings that keep it lit and dry. That is a habitability fact rather than a scenic one: it is why people lived and buried their dead here for twenty-odd thousand years.

The dune that gave it the name

The arene candide — white sands — were a coastal dune at the foot of the cliffs below, gone by the 1920s. The cave is locally also Grotta dei Frati or Armassa; the present name dates from Arturo Issel's visit of June 1864.