| The town of Cutrofiano is known to be one of the oldest and most important centres for ceramic production in Puglia. The countryside surrounding the town is marked by numerous clay quarries where, since Roman times, material has been extracted for this craft. One of these quarries, in a place called Lustrelle, has now been transformed into the Parco dei Fossili (Fossil Park), set up after careful renovation work had been carried out on the extraction plant which had fallen into disuse in the 1970s. The area, which covers twelve hectares, gives the visitor a chance to see the different geological layers formed by the sea where there are a large number of prehistoric fossils, many extremely well preserved. The Fossil Park, already well known to scholars, can now be visited by tourists and those who would like to have the chance to see the distant past of this area close up. In a seventeenth century house near the quarry a museum has been set up, the Malacological Museum of Clays, where fossil-bearing sections extracted from the walls of the quarry are on display and some stereoscopic photos of micro shells. |