About 50 years ago in a small town north of Verona, Italy, a group of municipal workers who were trying to build a road found something unexpected. While cutting into a hillside to prepare to pour asphalt, they saw a unique rock structure on the hill’s face. A team of archaeologists later came and found a painting of a human-like figure, which was determined to be the oldest evidence of painting in Europe. The cave itself was believed to show signs of more than 50,000 years of civilization.

Around the same time, Marco Peresani was born. Today, fifty years later, Peresani, who became an archaeologist at the University of Ferrara, is showing us around the cave at Fumane—the same archaeological hot