The Sibillini Mountain Range in Italy: a Disregarded Geoheritage now Unveiled

For centuries the Sibillini Mountain Range, in the Italian Apennines, has been inhabited by mysterious legendary tales, celebrated by poems, romances, travel diaries and even scientific investigations. On the top of Mount Sibyl (2,173 mt.) the entrance to a large cave is present, now obstructed: according to the legend it housed the subterranean abode of an oracular Sibyl, a prophetess and seductive queen. Another legend lives on Mount Vettore (2,476 mt.), a different peak raising just a few miles away: there lies a glacial lake, in which the cursed body of Pontius Pilate, the ancient prefect of Judaea, would rest guarded by legions of demons. To them necromancers would have resorted, in past centuries, for the consecration of their grimoires.

Since the late eighteenth century, the two legends have been an object of study for philologists, medievalists, folklorists and other scholars. Research has mainly been conducted on the sibylline legend, considered as an independent tale, in search of a mythical connection to classical Sibyls. However, a correct approach to both legends should be based on the following question: how can the Sibillini Mountain Range host two different, mythically-mighty, mutually-independent legendary tales, on two neighboring peaks?

A new insight on the origin of this legendary tradition has been recently proposed by the author of the present abstract, based on a geomythological approach.

The applied methodology has included a phased analysis specifically designed to address the multi-layered stratification of the legendary material living amid the Sibillini Mountain Range.

The results of the first phase rendered it possible to outline the manifest lineage of the legend of Mount Sibyl from the Matter of Britain, in which a similar character named 'Sibyl' is widely present as a companion and alter ego of Morgan le Fay; at the same time, the well-known medieval origin of the legend of Pontius Pilate and his corpse was fully retraced: a tale that has been narrated in a long series of works since the High Middle Ages, showing that the legend of the Sibillini Mountain Range is the local version of a wider tradition.

The subsequent analysis has cast a specific light on the potential presence of an earlier legendary tradition, marked by a dark hue and significant otherworldly characters. This more ancient narrative was certainly a main attraction factor for the later, medieval legends.

Finally, it clearly appeared that the cave and the lake were fundamental elements in the original, underlying legend, as geographical landmarks and possible access points to some sort of Otherworld in the beliefs of the local populations in antiquity.

As a conclusion, the original legend was conjecturally connected with the peculiar seismic behaviour of the Sibillini Mountain Range, whose territory is recurrently stricken by devastating earthquakes (2016, 1979, 1859, 1730, 1703, 1328, 99 B.C., 268 B.C. and beyond). The presence of a cult of earthquake demons to be appeased was envisaged. This is an unprecedented result, never proposed before by other scholars: a bright instance of mythogenic landscapes, cultural narratives and intangible geoheritage.