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Passo di Corvo
Photo: Fabio Benvenuto

Passo di Corvo

The Archaeological Park of Passo Corvo, discovered by chance during a Royal Air Force air expedition in 1943, is an important site that preserves the remains of a Neolithic settlement active between the fifth and fourth millennia a.C. The park, which covers an area of about 130 hectares, offers the opportunity to admire the reconstruction of places and scenes of daily life of Neolithic families, including a life-size hut, a moat, and animals.

The park's elements, which were reconstructed based on testimonies discovered during the excavation phase, recreate a typical entrenched village as it existed between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. Walking through the streets of the settlement, you can see a dwelling with a moat, a hut, and the domestic and agricultural activities that characterized the population at the time.

The largest Neolithic archaeological site in Europe. It is also open to visitors, which is unusual for the remains of a civilization that moved from the eastern Mediterranean and landed around 8 thousand years ago in areas such as the Tavoliere delle Puglie, Irpinia, Basilicata, and Sicily, and began to spread throughout Europe from the 6th millennium a.C. Puglia is thus considered one of the first European "rest stations" of this human flow, distinguished by the use of polished stone tools alongside Paleolithic ones in chipped stone, but most notably by a fundamental change consisting in man's transition from hunter-gatherer to producer of his own food through livestock breeding and agriculture.

The Archaeological Park Passo di Corvo in Foggia's Arpinova district, with its 130 hectares of extension, is considered Europe's largest Neolithic village so far unearthed. When the site was discovered during a Royal Air Force air expedition in search of enemy targets to bomb, the images obtained by the on-board photographer highlighted a unique concentration of paths, walls, ditches, fences, recesses, and arpinova's suspicion of the presence of a massive underground base.

Thus, the remains of a settlement that had to accommodate at least 300 people between the sixth and fourth millennia BC were unearthed, with traces of different housing units, 'C' ditches used for the protection and drainage of the land around the individual houses, rainwater cisterns, silos, fences, 16 burials, and objects of daily life and worship that are now kept in the Civic Museum of Foggia and the National Archaeological Museum of Manfredonia. There has been no shortage of archaeobotanical finds, such as legume seeds and cereals, attesting to the settlement's agricultural activities. Today, Passo di Corvo is one of the few Neolithic archaeological parks in Italy, and it also houses a 1:1 scale reconstruction of a Neolithic hut, complete with moat and animals, aimed at reenacting scenes of domestic and agricultural life in the settlement. The site is easily accessible, as it is located just outside of Foggia's urban center, in the Arpinova district: simply take state road 89 and divert to San Marco in Lamis, then proceed for a few kilometers to the park's entrance.
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