La categoria di “grotta sacra” tra testi classici e storiografia moderna

The paper aims to reconstruct the main stages, from evolutionism to phenomenology, which marked the emergence, in the twentieth-century historiography, of the historical-religious category of “sacred cave”, moving on the two levels of the ancient representations and of the modern interpretations. Through the examination of case studies drawn from the Greek and Roman worlds, we try to verify the extent to which the definitions of the modern scholars coincide with the “emic” perspective in order to sketch a picture of the ritual function of the cave that can be the most close to the systems of representation and the conceptual taxonomies of the ancient cultures.