Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of rock engravings, patiently carved by thousands of hands over several millennia of human presence in the Valley, form a body of art and life with few equals. I have watched its fame grow steadily ever since I first visited it with Emmanuel Anati in the 1960s.Within this setting of extraordinary, austere natural and artistic beauty, the themes and languages of the engravings change over time, perhaps reaching their greatest complexity in the Iron Age, when some petroglyphs—this being the “technical” term for such rock carvings—seem to take on a distinctly topographical character, as if recording imagined views from above, a bird’s-eye perspective on one or another corner of the Valley.How can one doubt that when Tullio Pericoli, some years ago, came across the photograph of one of these engravings—the Bedolina Map—he immediately recognized in it a dark yet intense kinship? For decades, Pericoli’s art has been a patient exploration of landscape, especially that of his native Marche, though not only there: a landscape understood, as he himself has written, as “a cadence, a language, a dialect,” an indelible mother tongue that, through tireless visual experiences and equally persistent mental explorations, becomes painterly matter, a window or a lens onto the world. Salvatore Settis