Tectonic map of the Mediterranean region and displacements in back-arc regions since 35 Ma. A: Tectonic map of the Mediterranean showing the main mountain belts and basins and the large and small plates. B: Motion paths of crustal blocks in the Mediterranean back-arc basins after Menant et al. (2016a, 2016b) and Romagny et al. (2020). Crossing paths in the South Tyrrhenian Sea region are due to three main reasons as explained in details in Romagny et al. (2020): (1) the motion paths shown in this figure do not represent an instantaneous velocity field, which would forbid such crossings, but the full paths of each point, (2) the two sets of crossing paths corresponds to two very different origins for the moving points, (i) points initially belonging to Apulia (Adria) and moving first together with Africa northward and then recording the opening of the South Tyrrhenian Sea, thus northeastward and (ii) points initially belonging to the AlKaPeCa block and moving eastward all along since 30 Ma because they follow the rotation of the Corsica-Sardinia block during the opening of the Liguro-Provençal basin and then the opening of the Southern Tyrrhenian Sea. When the latter points reach the longitude of the present-day Southern Tyrrhenian Sea the other points are already further north and there is no “collision” (Romagny et al., 2020 show this kinematics in details, see the full movie of the reconstructions in the supplementary material of that paper), (3) the crossings are also partly due to the facts that some of these moving points selected for drawing Figure 1 correspond to thrust front of the Ligurian domain that has overthrust the Tuscan domain; these points thus move further eastward and their paths then cross that of the points belonging to the Tuscan domain.