La "Prìa scritta" di Cichero. Un culto pagano nel Levante ligure. Fotoalbum commentato delle campagne di rilevamento 2018-2021

At an altitude of approximately 900 metres, on the left side of a modest watercourse known as the 'rio dei Fighé', in the valley that separates the western slopes of Monte Cucco (mt. 1051) from the watershed of Monte Ramaceto (mt. 1345), near Cichero, a hamlet of San Colombano Certenoli (GE), a large slab of quartzitic sandstone was (re)discovered in 2018, with a surface area of about fifteen square metres, of which the local tradition already kept a memory in the toponym of an already lost 'Prìa scritta' . The surface of the rock shows a dense web of engravings, indicatively quantifiable at around six thousand signs, the majority of which refer to linear signs of natural origin, but a large portion can be traced back to the writing intent of the hand of man and, specifically, to some strings of letters of the Latin alphabet, which seem to recur similarly in several places on the rock. While their systematic interpretation is still 'in fieri', the first autopsy results have returned in the IOVI/IAVI formulae, engraved in full or in initials, a series of rock dedications addressed to Iuppiter, and to his possible epiclesis Avi[- - -].