Italy - The Murge of Altamura

The territory of Apulia, which is a narrow strip of land, can be subdivided into five sub-regions; three of them - Gargano, Murge, and Salento - are composed of a powerful sequence of limestone rock that was deposited in a shallow sea during the Mesozoic Age, between 200 and 100 million years ago. In particular, the Murge are a wide area of tableland, 50 Km wide and 150 Km long, of a basically rectangular shape, with a North-West to South-East orientation; they are mostly part of the Bari province, whilst a minor part of them is located in Brindisi and Taranto provinces. The northwestern portion, called "Murgia Alta", that is high Murgia, is a slightly hilly tableland area sloping towards the Adriatic Sea by a series of blunt-edged terraces. The whole area is marked by karstic phenomena related to the dissolution of calcium carbonate stone by rainfall, which has given rise to caves, swallow holes and dolines - some of them quite large and deep, locally termed as "puli" (see the pulo of Altamura). This area is almost stripped bare of vegetation and poor in surface running water on account of the thick mesh of stone cracks that channel all the rainfall towards the underlying karstic water layer; it is a bleak landscape where traditional forms of human settlement have been preserved. In addition to these landscape features, the Altamura area includes items of outstanding cultural and archaeological interest as shown by two locations - the De Lucia quarry, with thousands of dinosaur footprints dating back to about 70 million years ago, and the Lamalunga cave, where the complete skeleton of a man from the end of mid-Pleistocene can be seen. Both of them bear a unique testimony to the history of Earth and to the evolution of our species.