he Palaeontology Museum of Maglie, founded in 1964 by interministerial decree, is the result of the keen work of volunteers and experts among which Alberto Blanc, Antonio Lazzari, Giuliano Cremonesi, Claudio De Giuli e Decio De Lorentiis who founded and directed it until his death.

Maglie Museum is the natural evolution of a series of discoveries, excavations and studies that in this province has a tradition that strikes its roots in the positivism of the beginning of this century and that determined the need of gathering in a single "container" the palaeontologic and palethnologic finds coming from the Salento. Today, they are a representative collection of the fauna and of the litical production of the Pleistocene in the Terra d’Otranto. The museum is famous for the importance and the integrity of the osteological finds, drawing italian and foreign researchers coming from the universities with which the museum collaborates.

Hydria a figure rosse da Arpi

In the rooms are exhibited the fauna remains and the litical products coming from the caves that, for their stratigraphical preservation, are an instrument to know the history of the Salento animal peopling during the Pleistocene. To this knowledge, the fauna coming from the quarries of Lecce’s stone (a Miocene thin calcarenite) gives an extraordinary contribution. Into the stone reefs surface, vertical funnel-shaped Karst blowholes open, which worked as traps for animals or into which the meteoric water brought their remains. The fauna coming from the Jentarole (the above mentioned blowholes) are, therefore, exempt from any human intervention and, consequently, their bones are complete, not rarely anatomically connected and the fauna composition is more balanced as it is not the result of a selection caused by the hunting. The Maglie Museum offers, therefore, a complete picture of the local fauna starting from the Riss-Würm interglacial up to the end of the last glaciation and to the present climate. The visitor could observe some animal fossile remains evidencing the changes occurred in the course of millenniums.