Groundwater protection: contribution from Italian experience

Italian water supply for human activities comes from groundwater in its significative part, especially the portion of it, which is used for civil activities, and just for reason it must have qualitative requirements to be drinkable (Figure 1). In this paper it is shown some information coming from: • The Italian distribution of water resources; • Examples of large groundwater basin supplying human activities in the central Italy; • The Italian legislative framework on groundwater protection; • The most spread in Italy method for the evaluation of groundwater vulnerability with some examples of the application of it. At the end some considerations are written down to point out the most important results of Italian experience in this field and some indications coming from them.