The hinterland of the Taranto Gulf in Basilicata (southern Italy) provides a great opportunity for the study of coarse-grained coastal systems belonging to a staircase of Quaternary terraced ma-rine-deposits. Among gravelly successions, beach deposits abound in the stratigraphic record, offering exceptional outcrops useful to allow detailed information on their facies features. In this paper, we describe sedimentary facies, textural variations and depositional architecture of these deposits in order to:
- demonstrate that the area is an excellent training ground for the study of gravelly beaches in microtidal settings;
- discuss about the use of beach deposits as proxy of even small relative sea level variation.