  We measure radial gradients of the Mg2 index in 15 E-E/S0 and 14 S0 galaxies.
Our homogeneous data set covers a large range of internal stellar velocity
dispersions (2.0<logsigma<2.5) and Mg2 gradients (dMg2/dlogr/re* up to
-0.14mag/dex). We find for the first time, a noticeable lower boundary in the
relation between Mg2 gradient and sigma along the full range of sigma, which
may be populated by galaxies predominantly formed by monolithic collapse. At
high sigma, galaxies showing flatter gradients could represent objects which
suffered either important merging episodes or later gas accretion. These
processes contribute to the flattening of the metallicity gradients and their
increasing importance could define the distribution of the objects above the
boundary expected by the ``classical'' monolithic process. This result is in
marked contrast with previous works which found a correlation between
dMg2/dlogr/re* and sigma confined to the low mass galaxies, suggesting that
only galaxies below some limiting sigma were formed by collapse whereas the
massive ones by mergers. We show observational evidence that a hybrid scenario
could arise also among massive galaxies. Finally, we estimated d[Z/H] from Mg2
and Hbeta measurements and single stellar population models. The conclusions
remain the same, indicating that the results cannot be ascribed to age effects
on Mg2.

Astrophysics