Soil pollution in agricultural lands poses a serious threat to food safety, and suggests the need for consolidated
methods providing advisory indications for soil management and crop production. In this work, the three-step
extraction procedure developed by the EU Measurement and Testing Programme and two soil-to-plant transfer
factors (relative to total and bioavailable concentration of elements in soil) were applied on polluted agricultural
soils from southern Italy to obtain information on the retention mechanisms of metals in soils and on their level
of translocation to edible vegetables. The study was carried out in the Sarno river plain of Campania, an area
affected by severe environmental degradation potentially impacting the health of those consuming locally
produced vegetables