1. Purple Turd Gorge!
The color
purple stands for the imperial robes of Rome, the
planet Jupiter, the crown chakra,
the majesty of
mountains, a very good book and film...and then there's
this...
How can I put this delicately? I
can't? Fine. There really is a place just a few miles from
Naples in the province of Benevento along the Titerno
river, 7 km from the small town of Cusano Mutri in the
mountainous area known as the Matese ...a beautiful
canyon and a series of gorges cut into the rock by ages of
splendid erosion... a delight to nature lovers and
canyoning enthusiasts. One stretch is called Le Gole
di Caccaviola—roughly, Purple Turd Gorge! I
have no idea how that name came to be except, after hours
of absolutely no scholarship on my part, that it may have
something to do with the fact that here is where they
found the remains of the dinosaur known as Scipionyx
samniticus, an itst-bitsy baby dinosaur from the
early Cretaceous period (image, below). It was discovered
in 1981 and was the first dinosaur discovered in Italy.
The name means Sciopio's Claw from Samnium, also nicknamed
"Ciro" by a magazine
editor. Ciro apparently ate lizards and
fish, which may or may not have turned some of him purple.
Also, as it turns out, Purple Turd Gorge is very near the
spot of "Hannibal's Bridge." According to legend, this is
a bridge crossed by the Big H. and his elephants as they
moved down the peninsula during the Second Punic War to
visit Carthaginian rage and justice upon the puny Romans.
(That didn't work out too well.) As they say, more
research is needed. I suggest they try to figure out if
Hannibal's elephants ate small dinosaurs. If that doesn't
turn your guts purple, I don't know what will.
Or it might be musical,
since Ole Purple Turd Gorge reminds me of at least a few
Western songs. My friend, Larry,
has tried to sing it to the tune of Ole Buttermilk Sky
(1946, Hoagy Carmichael and Jack Brooks, written for the
film Canyon Passage. Yes, Canyon!
Coincidence? Uh-huh, sure:
Ole
Purple Turd Gorge
where livin' is
large
just watch where
you walk
in Purple Turd
Gorge
"Forge" is a much better rhyme, but that is Larry's
business. photo, top right, by Napoli Underground
2.
The
Geo-Paleontology
Park & the Paleolab
of Pietraroja
Just four or five
km to the east of the area described above, still in the
Matese massif, is the Geo-Paleontology Park of
Pietraroja at just over 800 meters a.s.l (2400 feet). It
is in an area called "the caverns," still karst, but is made
up of what is called (from German) Plattenkalk, finely grained limestone
conducive to the creation and permanence of detailed
fossils or imprints of organisms. You come upon an eerie
petrified lagoon of fossils first discovered in 1798.
Series of layers reveal fossils from the mesozoic to the
miocene on slabs of stone easily visible to the naked eye,
rare examples of
fossilized fish that are witness to some of the earliest
forms of life on earth. This is an area formed by the
tectonic mountain building processes that gave us the Apennines
and the Alps. The presence of fossilized sea
life tells us that the area was once under water. The Geo-Paleontology Park is considered one
of the most important natural resources in Europe for
scholars. It is fitting there should be a museum on
the premises, and it is called the Paelolab
(pictured), in existence since 2005. It employs
multimedia and scale models to try to recreate for
visitors what the area must have looked like 110
million years ago, when little Ciro was alive (see
image on the left in item above this one. That fossil
is in this museum).
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