Giardini d'acqua Porto Cesareo
“If you throw something in the sea, (after an unspecified and unknowable amount of time) the sea will give it back to you: wrought, finished, polished, shiny or opaque, depending on the material, and also wet, making the colors are even more vivid.”.
B. Munari (philosopher and artist, 1907-1998)
The spunnulate
On windy days, when the land and the sky change form and the clamor of the waves punctuates the silence, the sea takes up its ancient work of carving lace into the coastline. Meanwhile, hidden away, it sneaks into the stone from below and slowly, patiently carves out caves and cuts into the rock, like a scribe recording their holy testament. While, in scientific terms, the spunnulate are are sinkholes of karstic origin, created through the chemical and mechanical action of the sea water, for our senses they represent a work of art in constant transformation.
Karst Systems
Karst systems constitute one of the principal agents of landscape formation, both on the surface and underground, where it can pose serious risks for the stability of such terrain. The fragility of naturally occurring karstic caves, exacerbated by disrepair and/or alterations due to human activity, meant that there is the distinct possibility of a surface rupture. When this happens at ground level, we see the formation of sinkholes, with direct consequences for infrastructure, the built environment, and communication networks.
The coastal road from Taranto to Porto Cesareo, heavily traveled in the summer months, runs across the location of several spunnulate. In 2010, a section of road that connects Torre Lapillo to Torre Colimena running above one such sinkhole had to be shut to traffic and rerouted, as the asphalt was at risk of giving way below the weight of the vehicles in transit. The project for ensuring safety in these locations, which was conducted and completed in 2018, included the construction of a bell-shaped bridge at road level that travels above the sinkhole, relying on weight-bearing pylons at both ends. Tourist activity in and around Torre Castiglione has brought about the construction of many homes in close proximity to the coastline: in many cases, the associated structures, garden walls and private roads are on the verge of collapse, or in proximity to areas that are.
Detail sheets
Tsunami Territory
Over the past twenty years, the occurrence of devastating tsunamis around the globe has raised awareness of the need to measure coastal regions subject to this phenomenon, particularly in the Mediterranean basin. Some of these studies have been concentrated in southern Puglia, the coastal area that is most exposed to tsunamis in this region, thanks to numerous seismic structures capable of bringing about this phenomenon that coexist with surrounding bodies of water.
Detail sheet
The boulders of Torre Castiglione
Geomorphic research conducted along Mediterranean coastlines revealed the effects of tsunamis across the centuries: they appear in the form of boulders, rocky masses of large dimensions, at times isolated, stacked, or in large piles, which were broken off by the water and carried dozens of meters inland.
Since the storm surge in the Ionian and Adriatic seas are not sufficient to power the carving up and transport of such large masses, their accumulation in these areas is suggestive, instead, of the impact of a tsunami that would have hit the southern coastal region of Puglia in the past five centuries, presumably involving the area of Torre Castiglione as well.