Archaeological discoveries

After Paolo Lioy, generations of scholars studied this place, allowing us to gain an ever-greater understanding of the lives of its ancient inhabitants, as anyone can see by visiting the Naturalistic and Archaeological Museum of Vicenza. But we are curious to ask an archaeologist what it means to do research in a place like this.

My name is Cristiano Nicosia. I am an archaeologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Padua, and I am from Vicenza. In 1864 and again in 1871, Paolo Lioy, a naturalist from Vicenza who was also deeply interested in the archaeology of the Vicenza area, began digging exploratory pits in a place he called Pascolone and in another locality known as Ponte sulla Debba. These are two places—and Pascolone in particular—whose exact location we no longer know today, because place names have changed over time and because Lioy did not mark these sites on a map. Nevertheless, he left us drawings showing the sequence of layers he observed within the pits he had dug. Within those layers, he identified the remains of the famous pile dwellings. Many years later, in the early 2000s, emergency excavations were carried out in preparation for a public works project that was ultimately never built. During those excavations, it became clear that the sequence of layers was virtually identical to the one observed by Lioy. This showed that Lioy’s pile dwellings were still there, still preserved beneath the sediments near the lake. In 2024, working with the University of Padua, we carried out a series of core samples that allowed us to identify this sequence of layers, once again virtually identical to the one that Lioy had observed and described. Within our core samples, we found a piece of wood coming from the layers associated with the pile dwelling described by Lioy. We dated it using radiocarbon analysis, and the results showed that the pile dwelling at this point on Lake Fimon had been built, or at least inhabited, between 2300 and 2000 BCE. It therefore belongs to a period known as the Early Bronze Age. This period is characterised by the spread of pile dwellings not only here at Fimon, but also, for example, around Lake Garda and many other smaller lake basins across northern Italy. So, we know that beneath our feet lies an archaeological treasure—not a treasure in the material sense, but in terms of the knowledge it holds and the rarity of this type of archaeological setting, preserved within the sediments of the Fimon Valleys.