The aim of SAGA2003 cruise (Southern Adriatic and Gulf of Lion TOBI Analysis) is to study three areas of the Central Mediterranean: the South Adriatic margin, the Gela basin, and the Gulf of Lion. A severe and unprecedented cut to the requested ship time forced us to cut the area of the Gulf of Lion. The cruise contributes to a long-term multinational effort to study selected European continental margins, where we can investigate the fate of siliciclastic sediment in a source-to-sink frame through transport across, or storage on, the continental shelf and slope. At the start of the SAGA2003 cruise very little was known on the complex morphology and Quaternary stratigraphy of the study area, but several published cores reported high, though not uniform nor steady, sediment accumulation rates throughout the last ca. 30 thousand years. In the frame of the on going studies in the region, as for example the EU funded Eurostrataform project, the South Adriatic slope is a key area for: slope-parallel bottom current activity and growth of sediment drifts and sediment waves at variable rates during changing climatic conditions throughout glacial/ interglacial cycles; possible bypass of sediment during the modern sea level high stand; sediment instability with extensive slide scars on the upper slope and relatively recent mass-failure deposits on the lower slope and in the adjacent basin; an excellent stratigraphic archive for paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic studies in an area where geochronological precision is augmented by the deposition of multiple tephra layers.