Mediterranean mountain landscapes are undergoing a widespread phenomenon of abandonment. This brings, as a consequence, the loss of traditional land use practices, such as transhumant pastoralism, as well as shrub and wood encroachment, with repercussions on the biodiversity associated with semi-open, human-managed landscapes. In this study, we focus on a mountain pasture from the Southern Apennines (Italy), where free-ranging transhumant grazing is still carried out, to quantify the effects of grazing presence and exclusion on arthropod diversity, and to qualitatively characterize the plant communities of grazed and ungrazed areas. Using field sampling, remote sensing, and semi-structured interviews, we assessed the validity of traditional cattle farming as a landscape management tool. Indeed, high diversity grasslands excluded from grazing were characterized by significantly less even and more dominated arthropod communities, as well as fewer plant species and families. Moreover, in areas that have been consistently grazed over the years, we found no forest encroachment from 1955 to 2019. However, rural communities are experiencing difficulties in keeping local traditions alive, even with current agri-environmental schemes. Thus, traditional livestock grazing can be a valuable management tool to maintain high biological and cultural diversity, even if stronger cooperation and attention to local needs is necessary.

In this study, phylogenetic and biogeographic methods are used to investigate the evolutionary relationships between various types of Italian pasta ripiena (filled pasta) and related representatives from across Eurasia, using information from their geography, shape, content and cooking methods. Our results showed that, with the exception of the Sardinian Culurgiones, all the other pasta ripiena from Italy likely had a single origin in the northern parts of the country. Based on the proposed evolutionary hypothesis, the Italian pasta are divided into two main clades: a ravioli clade mainly characterized by a more or less flat shape, and a tortellini clade mainly characterized by a three-dimensional shape. The implications of these findings are further discussed.

As an initial step in more extensive research into the links between biological and cultural diversity in present-day Italy, we reviewed Biocultural Diversity studies that explore the relationship between biological and cultural patterns of diversity to determine whether any direct causal relationships or common drivers could be inferred. We found no significant attempts to quantitatively measure biocultural diversity in the country as a whole. Italy shows a high number of mutual interactions, but common drivers and patterns between biological and cultural diversity were not evident. This could be either a problem of quantification due perhaps to an inherent incommensurability between the two dimensions, or different causative patterns that drive biological and cultural diversity.