Twice a year, the members of our network meet at one of our member sites. In fall 2018, we followed the invitation of the team of Grotta di Fumane to sunny Valpolicella, Italy.

The meeting took off at the Natural History Museum in Verona with a welcome by Federica Gonzato, director of the future National Archaeological Museum Verona. Curator Leonardo Latella gave us a special tour of the museum, Marco Peresani (University of Ferrara) presented the great results of 30 years of research at the Grotta di Fumane, and the team of Homo 3.0 gave insights into their great educational programme at the cave - and beyond. 

An important part of our network meetings is always dedicated to sharing news and ideas from the members, and this time we saw great films created with school groups about prehistory, heard about new exhibition programmes, developments at World Heritage sites and ideas to enhance the visitor experience at archaeological sites. And we learned about new management models for museums. 

For the first time there was also a small sub-conference dedicated to a specific topic - a model that will be retained for future meetings. This time, we started to discuss politics, policies and diversity, and we will continue to do so at our next meeting in spring 2019, eventually looking into publishing the results of our discussions. 

Besides, new projects for the coming year were planned, the biggest being an international photo contest in cooperation with CEWE Photo Award 2019. We will also be present at several scientific and public events both on- and offline during the year, and you can also look forward to a new edition of our Ice Age Europe Magazine and more. 

But of course we also enjoyed Italy to the full on these three days! We were able to hold our meeting in the magnificent Villa della Torre Allegrini. We tasted great Italian food and wonderful wine, and of course visited Grotta di Fumane ourselves with expert guidance from our colleague Marco Paresani. 

Our next network meeting will take place in March 2019 at the Museum of Altamira, Spain.