From common and used to rare and forgotten: Past and present distribution of the archaeophyte Euphorbia lathyris L. (Euphorbiaceae) in southern Italy and Sicily

Abstract

Our study aimed at clarifying the current and previous occurrence, distribution and status (native vs. introduced) of Euphorbia lathyris L., the caper spurge, in S Italy and Sicily: most of the recent Italian floras and checklists, in fact, do not report this species for this area. To do this, a multi-disciplinary research was carried out taking into account not only botanical but also ethnobotanical and dialectological sources and a survey of the main herbaria of central and southern Italy. Our results point out that E. lathyris was much more frequent, well-known and commonly used in the whole southern Italy and in Sicily until 2-3 centuries ago, and that it probably experienced isolated cases of short naturalization at that time. Nowadays the caper spurge still occurs with few, small and scattered populations only in Molise and Calabria.