From the Cretaceous of dinosaurs to the Neolithic of prehistoric men, Salento holds much deeper roots than we can imagine: wonderful, concrete evidence of the evolution of the Earth and the mysteries of human beings.
In one of our previous articles, we spoke of a time when Salento was completely submerged by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, in which humongous marine species swam and limestone developed. The same stone that millions of years later would give birth to the wonder of Salento’s Baroque, preserving within itself the remains of these eras, incredibly distant in time from us, yet which unique beauty is still present today.
Indeed, the Lecce’s stone has kept intact several fossils and artefacts dating back to prehistoric times, from the Cretaceous (145 million years ago, at the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs) to the Miocene (23 million years ago). In the waters of Salento lived monstrous marine animals such as the Zygophyseter Varolai, an enormous ancestor of sperm whales, whose 255 bone pieces belonging to a specimen over 6m long were extracted from dozens of blocks of Lecce’s stone intended for building and now protected and exhibited in the MAUS, the Museum of the Environment of the University of Salento. The museum is rich in fossils of fish, molluscs, corals, crustaceans and marine and terrestrial vertebrates perfectly preserved in the deposits of this malleable lithotype typical of local architecture, which came to light during the Miocene period during the lowering of the sea depths and development of vast expanses of grassland.
Speaking of prehistory, from dinosaurs to man the step is big, but in the small Salento it may seem short: from the waters to the coasts. Here, the numerous karstic caves offer not only a great impact on tourism and landscape but also on history, since they constitute the oldest evidence of the presence of a local primitive civilization. Human traces discovered in Grotta Romanelli in Castro (remember Aeneas’ landing place?) date back 350,000 years, i.e. long before the first Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals appeared in Italy. This is the most considerable evidence of the Palaeolithic, which shifts the certainty of human presence in the Mediterranean area back 200,000 years, thanks both to the expressions of wall art and engravings of zoomorphic themes and the remains of prehistoric fauna such as Icelandic cranes, Arctic seagulls, reindeer and the boreal penguin.
Also in Castro, the Grotta Zinzulusa – reachable by sea and land – was inhabited by man in prehistoric times just like the Grotta della Poesia in Roca, a place of worship and shelter from the elements since the Neolithic period. But it is the Grotta dei Cervi at Porto Badisco that is considered the real prehistoric monument in Salento. Situated twenty-six metres below sea level, it has been described by National Geographic as ‘The Sistine Chapel of the Neolithic’ for its extraordinary pictorial cycle dating from 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. The Grotta dei Cervi is the largest Neolithic complex in all of Europe with its three thousand pictographs and graffiti in red ochre and bat guano depicting hunting scenes, deer, and hominids with bows and arrows. Whose authors, incredible but true, seem to have wanted to leave their signature by imprinting their hand prints on the rock: an indelible sign of our ancestors to future visitors to a Salento yet to be discovered. Because in this amazing peninsula, prehistory has left the mark of its presence in the sea, on the coasts and even inland.
It is enough to venture into the countryside of the province of Lecce to come across a vast number of megalithic works, divided into three main categories: Dolmens (large vertically arranged monoliths on which another large slab of stone lies horizontally), Specchie (piles of stones not to be confused with dry-stone walls) and Menhirs (monoliths fixed vertically in the ground or in the rock bank). We are still talking about the European Neolithic period, between the 7th and 3rd millennium B.C., and these monuments therefore belong to the final phase of Prehistory, between the establishment of agriculture and livestock farming and the beginning of metalworking. There are not many areas on the continent where they can be admired (think of Stonehenge in England or some areas in Sardinia and Corsica).
Just a few minutes from the Dimora Storica Don Totu are the ‘Megalithic Garden of Italy’ in Giurdignano – which houses and protects no less than seven dolmens – and the ‘Li Scusi Cultural Park’, named after the dolmen of the same name discovered here in the late 1800s.
Their purpose remains a mystery to this day: some historians speak of burial monuments, but it cannot be ruled out that they were used for other types of rituals that are still unknown today, as are these thousands of years of evidence of a remote past that has marvellously survived to the present day, from the waters to the coast to the hinterland, from the Cretaceous of the dinosaurs to the Neolithic of prehistoric men… Countless pictorial and megalithic traces are often installed right next to the still-existing ones of the first people recognised as ‘Salentinian’: the Messapi.
But this is really another story…