The excavation of the Early Bronze Age village of Tufariello, Buccino, in Italy forced the recognition of a problem crucial to the understanding of the Bronze Age sequences in the Italian peninsula. At this site, fine ceramic ware exactly fit the description of such ware known from Subapennine, Late Bronze Age sites. The Tufariello site, however, is firmly set in an Early Bronze Age, Protoapennine tradition, thus demonstrating convincingly that the be-ginning and final moments of the Apennine ceramic tradition may visually be identical. -- AATA