Aosta · Italy

Saint-Martin-de-Corléans Megalithic Area

Here the history of Aosta begins three thousand years before Rome. In the 1960s, during excavation for housing, there emerged rows of human-shaped standing stones, ritual pits, tombs and the furrows of a Neolithic plough still pressed into the soil. An entire sacred landscape, used and remade over millennia, beneath a modern district. The stelae are slabs over two metres tall, with faces barely sketched in, belts, weapons, ornaments: portraits of people or of gods, we do not know. We do know that some carved and raised them at enormous effort, and that others, later, threw them down and reused them as building material. A place of worship that lasted centuries, then overturned by those who came after. By the time the Romans founded their city two kilometres from here, this place was already two and a half thousand years old, and they most likely did not know what it had been.

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How old are the stelae?

They date from the late Neolithic and the Copper Age, broadly the third millennium BC. The site itself, though, was used and reshaped over a far longer span.

Why were they knocked down?

We do not know for certain. Some were toppled and reused in later structures: it could be a change of cult, a change of people, or simply good stone within reach.

What can you see today?

The excavation is covered by a museum building that leaves it readable from above and from walkways. You walk over the site rather than beside it, which is the part that stays with you.

Where it is

Via/Rue Italo Mus, Arionda, 11100 Aosta · 45.73547, 7.29739 · Open in Maps

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