 almost lunchtime, so I promise I will not take longer and I will try to stimulate your appetite for the break. I would like to thank the organizer of this session, when I spotted the title of the after-automated enormous program, immediately I, you know, really enthusiastically had the idea to participate, to propose, and I thank them to have accepted my intervention. Not just because I am a specialist in rock cat architecture, but living and working in Sicily clearly make this something very common, something that the perception of the persistence of rock cat architecture in the landscape is very, very common. I'm a pre-stolic archaeologist and therefore I have to do with also with rock cat architecture, but with this presentation I don't want to concentrate on just a single site or a single phase, but I will try to give a kind of historical picture of what is rock cat architecture in central Sicily. We focus mainly on central Sicily, the area where I'm living and working, and also I would like to discuss the impact of rock art, rock cat architecture on the landscape both in the past for the communities of the past, how they use the water body we're using, rock cat architecture, and for the community of the present. I will try, if we have the time, to conclude with some remarks on the present day use of rock cat architecture. As I said, rock cat architecture has provided the key contribution to the shaping of the Sicilian landscape as in the prehistory and through the centuries up to very recently. The Isla communities developed very early the techniques necessary to cut and shape the wide diffused limestone, sandstone in my area, the ray also the flesh formation. This is where to realize cemeteries, cult places, military, outposts, habitation, productive facilities. Here I choose between the many opportunities that the Sicilian clergy provides two famous examples. One is Fantalica, the necropolis close to Syracuse with almost 5,000 graves cut in this large mountain. Clearly they are not all in use at the same time. The chronology goes from the Red Bronze Age 12th century up to the period, so the 7th, 6th century BC. While this one is this is a cataclysm and it's near Lagoosa, again in the South-Eastern Sicily, dating from the 4th century AD up to the Byzantine period, so the 8th, 9th century AD. But it is very important also for present day. This is the village of Sperling, guys, just one of the minutes I put another part of my area. Houses built inside the rock have been excavated since almost 40 years ago. People were still living there even now, people are living there, even if now only the more poor part of the population living in the rock cut. While other rock has been used as for animals, for others, use this. The persistence in the present day landscape of ancient rock cut architecture plays a crucial role in the understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of human occupation in the various parts of the island, even for those part that don't have clear archaeological evidence, the principle of rock cut architecture given idea of ancient occupation of the area. At the same time, however, this same persistence poses a series of interpretative limits to the definition of the chronology and the function of the rock cut structures. The techniques and the tools used to cut the rock are very conservative, remaining almost immutable through the centuries. Rock cut structures have often changed their functions with the overlapping different uses in the same place and the continuity of the same structures even with different roles has provoked the disturbance and the disappearance of the oldest and the photographic context. We can start to talk about rock cut structures in Sicily during the prehistory. The oldest evidence are dating to the early Copper Age around the 4th millennium BC with what we call shaft burials. So we have vertical shaft excavated in the bedrock and then excavated the footer chamber just on the side with the deposition of one or two bodies and the part of the statues. Okay, there is an evolution. We move from vertical shafts to frontal entrances. This is early Bronze Age and the third beginning of 2nd millennium BC. This is the Necropolis of Castelluccio which is given the name to the entire period. We have a single grave with a single cell but often they have also a kind of monumental front decorated with pillars, columns and this is a written 3D reconstruction of what could be the appearance of the early Bronze Age burial with the entrance closed with a slab deposition just in front of it. Coming to the area where I'm working, the Ere Aplan is a very wide hilly area placed in the eastern part of central Sicily in the red box. A different landscape situation. A series of rivers are crossing the entire area in the west-east direction toward the Union Sea. The area is delimited on the west by the Miramini Giunale which is the longest rivers in the area. In terms of geology, as I said, the area is characterized by the presence of limestone and sandstone mainly and in the other part along the southern part of the Neverea chain we have the fish which is kind of sand which can be compressed on the seabed and then emerged when the mountains of the northern part of Sicily emerged. As I said, we have a long history with different meanings and different uses of rock art architecture. Here you see a kind of a very schematic framework different from the rest of the island. In the early Copper Age, in the central part, we don't have any evidence of rock cat architecture. We start with the late Copper Age, which is a funerary meme I use, which goes up down to the Roman Byzantine period. From the Greek, rock cat architecture started also to be used in order to create the cult places. Things are to change in the medieval period. As we will see soon, rock cat architecture has been used in order to defend castles which would be created inside the cliffs and productive only very recently. As I said in the last four or five hundred years, rock cat architecture has been used for interpretation. We start with the late Copper Age. We have this series of necropolis very small, very close to the sites, to the villages with multiple chambers. There is a number of graves. Then we move to the early Bronze Age, where the necropolis is always placed near the village, but not anymore in a strict connection, but just above, dominating from above the village. The number of graves for each cemetery start to increase, until to reach what I said in the late Bronze Age that I just showed you first, the panthenic necropolis. This one is a necropolis near Enna. It's a real Mese. It's almost 350 graves preserved. In the Greek period, we have rock cat graves, which have the typical square while doing the pristo in proto-history. The shape of the graves, rock cat graves, are circular. In the Greek period, they are rectangular. They have benches for the position and open the roof of the grave. It was double-pitched. But then we start also to use to have rock cat cult places called Sumatvica in Enna itself, as the site excavated just on the eastern fringe of the Enna proto. And this is what we as community excavated in 2008, and it's possible in area dedicated to the cult of the limiter, because we found a series of elements indicating this. As a bot cross with the position, we found a series of female statuettes inside this. And then we have this vertical side, which has been carved with a series of niche which are known in other Sanctuae dedicated limiter in Agri Gento and Syracuse and in other areas. It is a kind of room. It is a rectangular room, probably used for ritual buckets. Moving from Greek to Roman period, in the early period of the Roman period, we are on the second and third century. We have a series of onbaria. Clearly there's been a lot of debate on these funerary or others. Consider this is the urban cave. It's been found by Paolo Orsi back in the 30s, last century. And it's called the Grotta della Spezzeria, which means the spicy cave, because at the beginning they were thinking that there was something working with spices and using this niche to put all the products. The other one is Canalotto, it's a few kilometers away from Enna. And the Peleons were the more exponential. But here, which of the onbaria moved to Enna before one of its important excavations, he was able to excavate the lower part of this Caesarea. Yes, and he found one slab closing the niche with the dedication in Latin, so this was approved that this was a funerary area. In Rome, these are dedicated to the Betti, which are the slaves which had been freed. It's a typical in Rome around the second and first century AD. And this is the period which Sicily was the granary of the pipe. So a lot of expansion of agricultural work and possible the diffusion of this. I just put some examples, but in all central Sicily and some of the eastern Sicily, these are quite common. It can be connected with this passion of cultivation of the area. Later on, in late Rome, we are talking about 4th, 5th, 6th century AD, we start to have complex catacombs with sub-girot graves, rectangular graves excavated on the floor, and with archosoli, so graves excavated on the vertical sides. During the Byzantine, we have only sub-divo graves, but Canalotto is a rock-cut village. Clearly, we have some evidence that this has been used already since probably the prehistory. Some prehistoric rock-cut tombs are still preserved in the area, but the maximum expansion started with a Byzantine period and continued during the Islamic period. Islamic period has been evidenced by Aldo Messina, a colleague from the Trieste University, that in one site, just in the northern part of the area, he located along one of these cliff sediments where he could jail, and he interpreted one of the possible rock-cut mosquitos. The passage from the Byzantine to the Islamic, and then after Islamic to other periods, is well evidenced by the presence of a series of castles, which have been realized cutting the rock, the most famous in Spellinga and Gagiano, that our structures were quite big, very complex, completely cut inside the bell rock, the deflation meeting. I want just to conclude, just to give an idea, what is the complexity of study rock-cut architecture with the story of a single cave, a cave which has been found in and during the Sanctuary we are located in the 8th. This cave, which is just dug aside, the side of the niches, was first of all a grave during the Greek period, because we have clearly the remains of the retangular entrance, typical of the great graves. During the Roman period, the way we're inside has been escalated to the city of Arcosoli, and the dimension was very small, so probably children, still the same use of funerary, but different ritual. During the medieval period, it was not used anymore as a funerary space, but as a productive space. We have a series of pits filled with middle-late medieval pottery. So the same cave has changed to the Sanctuary's meanings, uses, and function. I want just to conclude saying that we need clearly more attention to the technological, many of the papers this morning are very instructive for me, but I give a lot of ideas that can be used in order to start projects on focusing on the study of rock architecture, escaping a little bit from the typical cultural material approach used in Sicily. It's important that the persistence of this rocky landscape is used today in order to propose projects in which these caves, these graves, these cathedrals, became part of a shared identity and used by local communities to produce new acts of construction of the Sicilian mass. Thank you.