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Cave paintings in La Grotta del Genovese on the Egadi island of Levanzo, Sicily

Prehistoric cave paintings on an island off Sicily's west coast

A bull carved into the rock walls of the Grotta del Genovese on Levanzo Island. I highly recommned booking this two-hour tour ahead of time by calling tel. +39-339-741-8800 or +39-0923-924-032 (www.grottadelgenovese.it). But if you failed to do so, just ask at the bar above the port for someone to ring up Natale.

He will drive you across the Island in a jeep (or, in good weather, around the coast by boat), lead you down a short trail through the macchia scrubland, and unlock the protective gate across the entrance to the ★★★ Grotta del Genovese.

This low cavern was rediscovered in 1949 to be covered inside with positively spectacular prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs (incision carvings).

Some of this neolithic cave art is a "mere" 5,000 years old. Another group of cave incisions (art scratched into the walls) has been tentatively dated to 9680 BC—that's more than 11,500 years old.

Cave paintings in the Grotta del Genovese, Levanzo, Edagi Islands, Sicily And what do these prehistoric picassos depict?

Well, among many other things—people and deer, horses and long-horned cattle, plus something that looks oddly like and elephant—there are men hunting tuna, which remains to this day the main industry of these islands.

(These are also the oldest paintings of fish known in Europe.)

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