The Cretaceous Carbonates of Monte Faito

During this field trip we will have a look at the Lower Cretaceous shallow-water carbonates of the Apennine Carbonate Platform exposed along the road SS269 of Monte Faito (Sorrento peninsula, southern Italy) and at megabreccia body exposed at the top of the mountain ridge. In stop 1 we will use a scenic spot looking at the western slope of Monte Faito to give a short introduction to the geology of southern Apennines and to the stratigraphy of the Apennine Carbonate Platform. Stop 2 is a roadcut exposing Barremian – lower Aptian peritidal facies displaying Milankovitch cyclicity. Stop 3 is a roadcut exposing upper Albian limestones and dolostones of inner platform facies with quartz crusts representing vanished evaporites. Stop 4 is an easy mountain path along the crest of the Monte Faito ridge. We will look at panoramas exposing a 700 m thick well-bedded succession of Lower Cretaceous limestones and dolomites sharply overlain by a chaotic megabreccia whose interpretation is still debated. The Lower Cretaceous well-bedded succession of Monte Faito has been investigated as an outcrop analogue for the fractured carbonate reservoir of subsurface Basilicata (Val d’Agri and Tempa Rossa oil field, southern Italy) (Corradetti et al., 2018 and references therein).