The modern Messina Strait ia a 3 km-wide passageway where tidal currents dominate sedimentary processes, forming discrete depositional subaqueous areas with specific erosional features and bedforms. Its modern uplifted margins preserve remnants of an analogous ancient strait connecting the Tyrrhenian with the Ionian seas at least from the late Pliocene. This field trip illustrates outstanding outcrops where the ancient strait sedimentary dynamics is reconstructed with constant referenc to its modern counterpart. 

The Siderno Strait was a tectonically confined gateway linking the Tyrrhenian Sea with the Ionian Sea during the Pliocene-Pleistocene. Since it was the widest among several adjacent straits, it provided subaqueous conditions favorable for the development of elongate sand bars and ridges, in its axial sector, along with deflected deltas impinging from the tectonically-active margins, which being elongated and detached in their delta-front lobes, under the powerful effect of amplified tidal currents. This field trip offers a unique chance to visit probably the most outstanding outcrops ever of almost entirely preserved tidal sand ridges.

This field trip is an annual field course founded on an Erasmus-based cooperation between the University of Basilicata (Italy) and the University of Stavanger (Norway). The course provides an overview on the Southern Apennine Orogenic System through a series of stops, located from the inner to the outer sectors of this structural complex. Miocene and Pliocene-Pleistocene thrust-top, deep-water and shallow-water deposits are observed, to finally discover foredeep to foreland strata. The course is also a chance to get some practice on sedimentary logging on outcrops and stratigraphic correlations exercises.

This field trip leads to the exploration of one of the most incredible outcrops of Miocene turbidites of southern Italy. Along a more than 14 km-long stratigraphic section, a series of vertically-stacked turbiditic channels encased into levee heterolithics are exposed. They show seismic- and subseismic-scale features observable from panoramic viewpoints but, at the same, time, the very good accessibility to the outcrops discloses internal depositional architectures and facies-scale details of deep-water deposits. The trip particularly provides examples of sand-rich outcrop analogues for subsurface turbidite reservoirs and is useful to minimize uncertainties related to subseismic-scale gaps. 

The Sardinian Graben System was a rift basin consisting of adjacent, block-faulted grabens and half-grabens, which recorded the multi-stage extensional opening of a seaway. It resulted in continental sedimentation, being subtly transgressed by shallow-marine to deep-marine, wave- and tide-influenced deposits, recording the collapses of the various segments of the graben system. This trip offers the opportunity to visit a variety of depositional settings associated to rifting. Outcrops allow along-dip and along-strike stratigraphic windows useful to predict fault-adjacent facies changes in subsurface analogous settings.

The Sant'Arcangelo Basin developed first as a wedge-top depression and, later as a pull-apart basin during the Plio-Quaternary, at the forefront of the Apennine Orogen, southern Italy. Alluvial-fans and fan-deltas dominate over other deposits being replicated several times across four major depositional sequences. This field trip provides outcrop examples of  aggrading coastal sequences and parasequences governed by a virtual continuous accommodation and strike-slip flexuring imposed on marginal-marine deposits, leading to depocentral partitioning and intra-basinal separation. Subseismic-scale examples of sandstone wedging, tongue pinching-out and basinward facies changes are some specific subjects.

The area around Matera exhibits a number of outcrop sections preserving a peculiar setting of Plio-Pleistocene age: a tectonic horst surrounded by coalescent sublittoral coastal sedimentary wedges, accumulated during a major stage of transgression. Coarse-grained clinobedded coastal bodies, forming accretional units lap agianst the flank of the Matera paleo-island, and stack in a general backstepping configuration. This setting, characteristic of a gently-sloping horst margin, is then compared with fan-shaped aprons, representing sublittoral sedimentation along an opposite steeper margin.

Matera is a town whose history goes back thousands of years. It has gone through many millennia of human evolution, making it a scenario of great historical and cultural interest. The Sassi are the most ancient quarters of the city, and they've been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1993.

The northern and central Amantea Basin preserve outcrops sections considered the sedimentary record of marginal and axial depositional zones of a tectonically-confined strait. In the margin, an example of tidally-deflected fan-delta can be seen, evolving from its proximal alluvial deposits, upward tidally-reworked delta-front facies. In the axial strait zone, mixed, silici-/bioclastic sandstone are diffusely characterized by a wide spectrum of cross stratification, considered as the record of strong tidal currents flowing in the deeper sector of the strait.