Soil pollution is of great environmental concern. Particular attention must be focused on urban areas, where heavy metals represent the key contaminants as a result of mainly anthropic activities. Under the evidence of their negative impacts on human health and ecosystems, environmental research is now working on reconstructing the fate of such elements, studying their behaviour during transport across soil layers. In the present thesis work, a small-scale approach has been adopted, with column and batch tests that investigated two target contaminants, zinc and aluminium. These two elements have been studied in the form of Zn(II) and Al(III) chloride solutions. The two selected elements have been analysed with UV-vis spectrophotometry technology.