Comments on the paper "A crustal-upper mantle model for southeastern Sicily (Italy) from the integration of petrologic and geophysical data" by Manuella et al. (2013)

The paper "A crustal-upper mantle model for southeastern Sicily (Italy) from the integration of petrologic and geophysical data" by Manuella et al. (2013) speculatively proposes that the basement beneath southeastern Sicily is made up of a fossil oceanic crust of Permo-Triassic age. The Authors support their hypothesis discussing the geochemical features of Cenozoic basic lavas and entrained xenoliths. Unfortunately, the paper does not include fundamental references on the subject, and these omissions limit the discussion of alternative hypotheses. In this reply we highlight that the new model proposed by the Authors is poorly constrained and that their argumentations are weak and sometimes wrongly founded. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.