The progress of knowledge about the Miocene successions of the Southern Apennines following Selli's papers of 1957 and 1962

The scientific contribution of Selli to the geological knowledge about the Central-Southern Apennines is of such an importance that the following researches are indebted, directly or indirectly, to his works, in particular to his regional syntheses. The most important of those contributions are recalled in this paper. Only recently Selli’s interpretation of the Albidona Formation as “mesoautochthon”, as well as its Miocene age, have been confirmed and extended to the Cilento area. The formation has been included in a Cilento Group, the deposits of a thrust-top basin overlying a substratum constituted by thrust sheets of internal origin. The latter are characterized by successions of basinal deposits, the uppermost part of which is Miocene in age. Stratigraphic and facies analysis of the Miocene deposits paraconformably overlying the Mesozoic carbonate platforms in different areas indicate analogue characteristics but different ages, thus showing the migration in space and time of a transgressive sequence, characterized by a marine ingression followed by gradual deepening up to the onset of the turbiditic siliciclastic sedimentation typical for a foredeep depocenter stage. In the Southern Apennines these diachronous events are most probably related to the roll back of the subducted plate. The difficulty of dating the foredeep and thrust-top basins successions, due to the strong reworking affecting those turbiditic sediments, was already perfectly outlined in Selli’s papers. This problem has been seriously considered in the modern biostratigraphy, developing integrated methods of analysis and elaborating new preparation techniques.