Italian Soil Management from Antiquity to Nowadays

This chapter begins with a short recollection of the general concepts of soil management and, thus, reports of the different methods to rate soil quality. Both these sections set the stage to a wide presentation of an historical overview of soil management that in Italy has been going on from the beginning of agriculture to nowadays. In this way, recent archaeological observations have allowed to proposed original theories about the genesis of badland landscapes, so diffuse in Italy. Particular attention has also been done on the impact of European directives on the soil and land management, taking into consideration all the directives promulgated from the beginning of the European Union. The chapter also reports of the land set-up systems devoted to soil and water conservation, many of them invented in Italy, and of the different soil managements adopted in different Italian physiographic agro-ecosystems: high-alpine environments, pre-alpine fringe, Po plain, Apennines, southern Italy, and the two great islands of Sardinia and Sicily.