The district where
the ancient elephants
grazed
When we talk about the treasures hidden in the subsoil of Rome we immediately think of classical antiquities. As a matter of fact there is much more…
At the entrance of the Rebibbia Underground Station in Rome, you can see a peculiar mural created by a famous Italian cartoonist: a strong mammoth on whose back are painted some characters symbolizing the spirit of the neighborhood. The mural shows all the skill of its author, Zerocalcare, but the animal depicted is probably the result of a misunderstanding. Woolly mammoths have never lived in those places, but on the other hand, herds of gigantic wrinkled, prehistoric elephants with four meters long tusks have been there.
Not far from the station, there is the area called Casal de’ Pazzi, a populous city district, crossed by the winding Aniene River, which was for a long time a part of the Roman countryside. Uninhabited in the past and dotted here and there by rare remote buildings, the place took its name from an ancient isolated farmhouse, fortified by a tower. The owners of the building, the Florentine family of the Pazzi, were famous for having been at the head of the 1468 conspiracy against Lorenzo de Medici that cost the life of his younger brother Giuliano.
At the end of the 19th century, when the city buildings hadn’t yet reached these areas, it was the place where the Roman aristocracy, the high society, and some famous writers, wearing red jackets, gathered for gossip, love affairs, fox hunting and endless rides among woods and fields. In the second half of the 20th century, the urbanists included this area in the development project of Rome and, since the Seventies, they began to build up a new district.
The discovery of a giant elephant tusk in 1981, during the urbanization works in the place where a museum now stands, started a series of archaeological excavations that lasted five years until 1986.
This investigation on an area of over 1200 m2 brought to light part of a preserved ancient riverbed, probably related to the course of the Aniene River, a Pleistocene deposit of fluvial origin dated about 200,000 years ago.
The paleontologists found the fossils of over 2,000 animals, which were decidedly very different from those living in today’s Europe:
ancient elephants (Elephas antiquus), the aurochs (Bos primigenius), the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius), the rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sp.), the hyena (Crocuta crocuta) and other animals of more familiar species such as deer, wolves,horses, boars, geese, and ducks.
But a further surprise awaited the researchers: the finding, in 1983, of the fragment of a skull belonging to the genus Homo and of over 1,500 stone artifacts of Middle-Paleolithic which confirmed the contemporary presence of humans hunters and gatherers. In the same place were found many fossil leaves of Zelkova crenata, a plant of the Elm family that today is common only around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and which in ancient times was also abundant in Italy.
Today the Museo di Casal de’ Pazzi, open to the public since 2015, contains part of the Pleistocenic deposit and exhibits the materials found in the area together with a set of panels that reconstruct the appearance of the site in the prehistoric age. The Pleistocene garden around the museum is a reconstruction of the vanished prehistoric landscape, with its ancient plants and trees.
It is worth to remember that Casal de’ Pazzi is not the only important discovery of this kind in ther city. In the area of Saccopastore, not far from Casal de’ Pazzi, along the same valley of the Aniene River, there is another notable site where were found two skulls of Homo nenderthalensis in 1929 and 1935. According to recent studies by Italian and American universities, these skulls can be dated back to 250,000 years ago and are perhaps the oldest Neanderthal man finds in Italy. Unfortunately, the dense urbanization of the Saccopastore area in the second half of the 20th century prevented the creation of a museum.
Further away from the city center, at km 11 of the Via di Boccea, there is instead the site known as La Polledrara di Cecanibbio that was identified and excavated in the period 1984-2014. It is an area of about 1,200 m2 , recently dated to 325-310,000 years ago: a riverbed, where anciently a river flowed, in which were found about 20,000 fossil remains of animals, flint and bone human tools, and traces of the presence of Homo heidelbergensis. In the ancient marshes around the river were trapped some elephants, one of which retains clear traces of slaughter done by humans. Nowadays La Polledrara houses a museum with evocative reconstructive panels.
If you want to visit the Casal de’ Pazzi Museum this the link for the info:
https://www.museocasaldepazzi.it/en/informazioni_pratiche/orari_e_indirizzi
At the link below an animated video made by findoutrome.com with a reconstruction of the Casal de’ Pazzi area in the Pleistocene