Given Italy’s long history of development and its limerock soils in the south, although I was ready to accept and am interested in finding out more about this “cementification” problem there, I did a search on cementification+soil+Italy and didn’t come up with much. I do know there was major erosive damage during the Roman Imperial period, but don’t know much more about it.
I’m wondering if they are suffering from a caliche buildup from irrigation or something like it. If you find out more, please ping me. Thanks!
Yeah, I got lazy and didn’t try to track it down, but I recall reading, uh, somewhere, some years ago, that during the 16 years Hannibal was running around Italy during one of the Punic Wars, the Roman response to his presence in southern Italy was to ‘scorched earth’ everything to deny him supplies — no doubt land that none of the senatorial families owned. The defoliation was never addressed thereafter, to the current day.