Iudica shared the interpretation of Houel, considering the sculptures to be funerary monuments. In 1840, Domenico Lo Faso, Duke of Serradifalco published a description of the site with illustrations by Francesco Saverio Cavallari and, following the interpretation of the Santoni as funerary monuments, identified the main figure as Isis-Persephone. This theory was followed in the next century by Paolo Orsi and by Pace who interpreted the sculptures as Demeter and Kore - the two Sicilian divinities "par excellence". The authority of the last two scholars long overwhelmed the alternative opinion of Alexander Conze who, using Cavallari's illustrations, first made the connection between the Santoni and Anatolian and Greek depictions of Cybele. In excavations by the Superintendency of Antiquities in 1953, Rosario Carta produced precise illustrations of the sculptures and Prof. Luigi Bernabò Brea took photographs which were published in a volume which allowed the sanctuary to be seen in the wider context of the diffusion of the cult of Cybele through the Greco-Roman world. The recognition of the unified structure of the site, however, was only established by the detailed study of Prof. Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, who through the comparison of a wide series of documents relating to the religious and historical context in which the sanctuary belongs, reconstructed the meaning of the sanctuary as far as its poor state of conservation allows in her book "I Culti Orientali in Sicilia".