CHAPTER VI 

 ITALY AND ITS ISLANDS 



ITALY cannot be called a country of mega- 

 lithic monuments. In the centre and north 

 they do not occur, the supposed examples men- 

 tioned by Dennis in his Cities and Cemeteries of 

 Etruria having been proved non-existent by the 

 Italian Ministry of Education. It is only in the 

 extreme south-west that megalithic structures 

 appear. They are dolmens of ordinary type, 

 except that in some cases the walls are formed 

 not of upright slabs, but of stones roughly super- 

 posed one upon another. On the farm of the 

 Grassi, near Lecce, are what appear to be two 

 small dolmens at a distance of only 4 feet apart ; 

 they are perhaps parts of a single corridor-tomb. 

 In the neighbourhood of Tarentum there is a 

 dolmen-tomb approached by a short passage, and 

 at Bisceglie, near Ruvo, there is an even finer 

 example, the discovery of which is one of the most 

 important events which have occurred in Italian 

 prehistoric archaeology during the last few years. 

 The tomb is a simple rectangular corridor 36 feet 

 in length, lying east and west. Only one cover- 

 slab, that at the west end, remains, and the exact 



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