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A fairly detailed structural model of the lithosphere-asthenosphere system (thickness, S- and P-wave velocities of the crust and of the uppermost mantle layers) has been defined in the Calabrian Arc region (Southern Tyrrhenian Sea, Calabria and the northwestern part of the Ionian Sea) in Southern Italy using seismic data from literature as a priori constraints of the nonlinear inversion of surface-wave data. The main features identified by this study are: (1) A very shallow (less then 10 km deep) crust-mantle transition in the Southern Tyrrhenian Sea and a very low vs just below a very thin lid, in correspondence of the submarine volcanic bodies Magnaghi, Marsili and Vavilov, while the vs in the lid is quite high in the area that separates Marsili from Magnaghi-Vavilov; (2) a shallow and very low vs layer in the uppermost mantle in the areas of the Aeolian Islands, Vesuvius, Phlegraean Fields and Ischia, which represents their shallow-mantle magma source; (3) a thickened continental crust and lithospheric doubling in Calabria; (4) a crust about 25-km thick and a mantle velocity profile versus depth consistent with the presence of a continental rifted lithosphere, now thermally relaxed, in the investigated part of the Ionian Sea; (5) the subduction towards northwest of the Ionian lithosphere below the Southern Tyrrhenian Sea; (6) the subduction of the Adriatic/Ionian lithosphere underneath the Vesuvius and Phlegraean Fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]