Abstract The Ordovician documented in southeastern Europe reflects different sedimentary environments, from shallow water to basin, belonging to diverse palaeogeographical domains. Some of these geological sectors and their palaeontological content have been well described for a long time such as the Carnic Alps, which represent one of the most continuous Paleozoic sequences in the world. For some other areas, the quality of the data is variable and the knowledge is less detailed, sometimes with lithostratigraphic units still to be formalized, which also reflects the fragmentary nature of the outcrops. The Ordovician stratigraphy of southeastern Europe with its diverse successions has been revised herein and integrated with new data in an attempt to develop a global scenario for this critical time interval in the evolution of life.

Steno’s life was punctuated by two conversions: (1) from anatomy and medicine to geology, and (2) from Lutheran to Roman Catholic confession. Why was Steno (1638–1686) motivated to solve geological problems soon after he entered the Tuscan region of Italy? Was there any link between his scientific conversion and the religious one, which occurred almost simultaneously and produced a revolution in his life? The origin of marine fossils found in mountains had been debated in Italy for one and a half centuries. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) had already given a modern scientific explanation for the problem. Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) later tackled the problem with an experimental-taxonomic approach (his famous museum and studio), and it was he who coined the word “geology” in 1603. Italy provided spectacular exposures of rocky outcrops that must have impressed the Danish scientist who had lived in the forested north European lowlands. Since the time of Giotto and his successors, such as Mantegna, Pollaiolo, Leonardo, and Bellini, the imposing Italian landscape had stimulated the visualization of geology. Inevitably, science and art merged perfectly in the work of painter and paleontologist Agostino Scilla (1629–1700). Steno was methodologically skilled and intellectually curious and was thus open to the stimuli that Italy had to offer in order to unwittingly rediscover, after Leonardo, the principles of geology and to solve the problem of fossils. Steno’s inclination to detailed “anatomical” observation of natural objects and processes as well as his religious conversion were influenced by his acquaintance with the circle of Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1647) disciples who formed the Accademia del Cimento. They were firm Roman Catholic believers. To the inductive mild rationalist and open-minded Steno, this connection could not be dismissed, and it prepared him for changing his paradigms for the sake of consistency. This occurred when a Corpus Domini procession triggered a revelation and led to his religious conversion.

Abstract The stratigraphical approach and geological mapping of William Smith in England and Georges Cuvier in France gave birth to modern geology. However, before 1815 neither used the word ‘geology’, a term first coined by Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1603. At the turn of the nineteenth century most leading geoscientists were based in France and Germany, but those in Britain were poised to take over the lead. After three centuries of dominance in science and geology, was Italian geology in decline? A review of the works of Italian geologists and the role these played in disseminating Italian geological research has been undertaken to examine this question. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars shocked the Italian states, disrupted the economic order and discontinued the progress of science. Nevertheless, from 1759 to 1859 over 40 classic papers in geology were published in Italy. Among them, Gian Battista Brocchi’s Conchiologia Fossile is the most renowned for having inspired Charles Lyell’s work. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Italian geoscientists made up the majority of foreign members of both the French and English geological societies. The Italian Geological Society was not formed until 1881. This was largely due to the earlier political fragmentation of Italy into many small states.

Abstract The basins in the Eastern Mediterranean can be divided into those that were formed mainly in post-Miocene time and those that were formed during the rifting episodes that led to the formation of the Neotethys. The younger basins can be further divided into those that were formed mainly in post-Miocene time and those that were formed in post-Pliocene time. The separation is not only one of convenience but also corresponds to major adjustments in the plate tectonic situation in the Eastern Mediterranean. The late Miocene deposition of thick evaporites throughout the Mediterranean region, or, where evaporites are missing, the creation of an important erosional unconformity during the extreme lowstand of the Mediterranean, makes the Miocene-Pliocene boundary relatively easy to identify, especially on seismic reflection records. At about the same time, following the collision of the Arabian plate with Eurasia, the Anatolian and Aegean microplates came into existence between the convergent African and Eurasian plates to accommodate tectonic escape between them. The general configuration of the Eastern Mediterranean basins reflects the tectonic and structural gradients between the collisional domain of southeastern Turkey and Iran, and the continuing but increasingly limited subduction along the Calabrian and Hellenic arcs, with the Cyprus and Levantine zones between them. Several distinct zones can be identified in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Dead Sea Fault system marks the edge between the collisional and pre-collisional zones to the east and west, respectively. The meridian through the Anaximander Mountains (30°E) forms a rough boundary between the zone of incipient collision to the east and the zone of continuing but late-stage subduction to the west. The Malta Escarpment forms the Eastern boundary of the Eastern Mediterranean basins. The series of basins along the northern margin of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea share this progressive evolution, with those containing Messinian evaporites to the east and those without to the west. The Sicily Channel with its associated basins is an extensional zone between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. The basins discussed in this paper are divided into two groups, the larger and older basins and the smaller and younger basins. In the first group are the Ionian Basin and the Levantine Basin, and in the second group the Cilicia Basin, Antalya Basin, Finike Basin, Rhodes Basin, Aegean basins, Sicily Channel basins, Latakia Basin and Larnaca Basin. The Eastern Mediterranean represents the last stage in the evolution of an ocean basin. Given the current motion between Africa and Eurasia, the Eastern Mediterranean will cease to exist in about 6–8 Ma from now. As a result, the larger and older basins are shrinking, whereas the younger and smaller basins are growing. Eventually the smaller basins will also disappear.

Under the pressure of industrial demands following the discovery of South African diamonds, gemology became a science during the late nineteenth century by combining morphological mineralogy with mineral physics and chemistry. However, it underwent an empirical, pre- to semiscientific period during the Renaissance, when market novelties required development in gemological knowledge. Pliny's Naturalis Historia (1469) was the reference treatise on gemstones among scholars, but it was the Italian translation of this work by Landino in 1476 that made gem studies grow. Indeed, while scholarly mineralogy developed through Latin texts, practical arts related to minerals developed through light handbooks in the new European languages. In Italy, the most active trading center at that time, where luxury goods were brought to be set in gold and distributed to all of Europe, most gem traders possibly understood some Latin, but certainly their providers did not, nor their customers. This is why the first original Renaissance book on gems, Speculum lapidum , by Leonardi (1502) , did not enjoy popularity until it was translated into Italian by Dolce in 1565. Similarly, Barbosa's accounts of travel to gem-producing India (1516) became known only after Ramusio translated them in 1554. Among gemological contributions in Italian, the most farsighted ones are Mattioli's translation of Dioscorides' De materia medica (1544) and Cellini's Dell'oreficeria (1568) . Moreover, three manuscripts did not reach the stage of being printed: Vasolo's Le miracolose virtù delle pietre pretiose (1577) , Costanti's Questo è ‘l libro lapidario (1587) , and del Riccio's Istoria delle pietre (1597) . They survived, however, to help clarify gem interests and activities by the merchant class in the transitional time from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Then, Italy lost its top position in culture and trade, and a Fleming, A.B. de Boot, wrote the treatise that summed up the available knowledge on gems at that time (1609).

Agricola's Bermannus (1530) and his “minor” works describe his career as an expert in mining knowledge. If we examine the period after publication of his collected works in 1546, Bermannus and the other works provide additional keys for understanding the influence of Agricola on development of the mineralogical and geological sciences in Italy. These publications also offer a way of understanding the link between the culture of the humanists and that of the practitioners; this, after all, led to the birth of the empirical sciences. Agricola's fourfold classification of fossil objects (earth, concretionary juice, stone, metal) improved considerably the twofold classification by Aristotle and became an influential paradigm for the scientists of the late sixteenth century that was further refined and developed as to the genetic environment of different types by Aldrovandi and Imperato.

The role of Leonardo da Vinci as the originator of landscape painting and his significance as a pioneer of geological thought and practice have been discussed by numerous authors. Leonardo was not alone, and the Florence region was a center, in the late fifteenth century, for artists interested in landscape and geology. Some art historians have emphasized the influence of Jan van Eyck on Florentine painters, placing special emphasis on his Stigmata of Saint Francis . The rock exposure in this painting is said to have been copied by many Florentine artists. However, there are many rock exposures around Florence that provided sites for observant artists. Francesco Botticini's Assumption and Crowning of the Virgin shows the Arno valley landscape, with the city of Florence in the far distance, but readily recognizable. Illuminated manuscripts have been relatively unstudied by geological historians. A large illustration by Gherado and Monte di Giovanni (ca. 1490) depicts a portion of Florence and its walls, partly obscured by an extraordinary small hill of carefully depicted graded or alternating bedded rocks, surmounted by a waterfall, this hill forming the centerpiece of the painting. It is possibly unique from an artistic point of view. The interest in geological features shown by so many Florentine artists of the period foreshadowed the important geological principles set out so clearly by Steno a century or more later; based on his observations in the region, Steno laid the foundations for the theoretical development of modern stratigraphy. Indeed, the writings of Leonardo seem to have clearly anticipated Steno's thoughts.

The Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605)—often reductively considered as a mere encyclopedist and avid collector of natural history curiosities—lived an adventurous youth and a long maturity rich of manuscripts, books, and outstanding achievements. He assembled the largest collections of animals, plants, minerals, and fossil remains of his time, which in 1547 became the basis of the first natural history museum open to the public. Shortly after that, he established the first public scientific library. He also proposed a complete single classification scheme for minerals and for living and fossil organisms, and he defined the modern meaning of the word “geology” in 1603. Aldrovandi tried to bridge the gap between simple collection and modern scientific taxonomy by theorizing a “new science” based on observation, collection, description, careful reproduction, and ordered classification of all natural objects. In an effort to gain an integrated knowledge of all processes occurring on Earth and to derive tangible benefits for humankind, he was a strenuous supporter of team effort, collaboration, and international networking. He anticipated and influenced Galileo Galilei's experimental method and Francis Bacon's utilitarianism, providing also the first attempt to establish the binomial nomenclature for both living and fossil species and introducing the concept of a standard reference or type for each species. His books and manuscripts are outstanding contributions to the classification of geological objects, and to the understanding of natural processes such as lithification and fossilization, thereby also influencing Steno's stratigraphic principles. The importance given to careful observation induced Aldrovandi to implement a uniformitarian approach in geology for both the classification of objects and the interpretation of processes. Aldrovandi influenced a school in natural history that reached its climax with the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with scientists such as Cospi, Marsili, Scheuchzer, Vallisneri, Beccari, and Monti in geology, and Malpighi, Cassini, Guglielmini, Montanari, Algarotti in other fields.

Examining the works of Athanasius Kircher and Nicolaus Steno allows similarities and differences to be drawn between their theories of Earth. This is aided by paying particular attention to the role of the French atomist Pierre Gassendi. With his friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Gassendi had a significant impact on Kircher's career and his thinking, and his work was read and noted by Steno in his student years in Copenhagen. Later, in the 1667 treatise Canis , Steno also appraised Gassendi's ideas on the origin of stones. Kircher's experiences of volcanism and earthquakes, gained during his expedition into southern Italy in 1637–1638, led him to formulate his theory of Earth in the early 1640s, when his Magnes was to be published. Completion of his theorizing about Earth was delayed, however, until publication of Mundus subterraneus (1665), in which he developed his concept of the “geocosm.” Steno probably met Kircher in 1666, and they are known to have corresponded on theological topics. In his Prodromus (1669), Steno criticized Kircher's idea of the “organic” growth of mountains. Steno adopted Descartes' idea of “collapse tectonics” and the formation of strata. Kircher's influence on Steno should not be neglected, however, given Steno's substantial excerpts from Kircher's Magnes in his manuscript. In fact, although Steno rejected the idea of a plastic force in his Prodromus , he may well have used Kircher's idea on magnetism to explain the growth of mineral crystals. Thus, given the usual wide acceptance of Cartesian influence on Steno, the historiography of geosciences may be appropriately and usefully revised by considering the role of the works of such figures as Gassendi and Kircher.

This paper deals with the influence that geological research in Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had on the reconstruction of Earth's history. The identification of the true nature (i.e., organic) of fossils by Fabio Colonna in the early seventeenth century and, later in the century, the Stenonian sedimentary geology in agreement with the Genesis and the volcanological studies of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli gave the learned men of the Modern Age important tools in order to establish a numerical dating of Earth's age. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, two Italian people, Jacopo Grandi and Francesco Bianchini, and the French Charles De Brosses, tried to build a calendar of the past of the world on the basis of natural and historical records. Even if they used the data in a profoundly different way, they reached (in fact, they wanted to reach) the same results: the confirmation of the same calendar of Earth's history elaborated by the most famous Bible chronologists at the middle of the seventeenth century ( Lightfoot, 1642 ; Ussher, 1654 ). De Brosses rejected the Italian dating, following the steps of his friend Buffon. He enlarged the geological calendar but did not understand, just like the two Italians, that at that time any absolute dating of the age of our planet was impossible.

The polymath Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658–1730) is generally regarded as the founder of scientific oceanography and marine geology. He also founded the renowned Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna in 1711 (a successor to the Florentine Accademia del Cimento ). Marsili's major scientific concern and unfulfilled ambition was a Treatise on the Structure of the Earthy Globe ( Trattato sulla Struttura del Globo Terreo ), a work-in-progress, containing some 200 sheets with more than 35 water-colored plates and some 50 pen drawings, kept in the Main Library of the Bologna University. Out of this material, Marsili's manuscript 90, A, 21 (dated 1728) is published for the first time as an appendix to this paper. It is an introduction to the planned treatise, accompanied by a summary and detailed index of its contents. This manuscript is useful in understanding the meaning of some recently published illustrations contained in the same collection. Such illustrations, together with their captions and the text of manuscript 90, A, 21, may be considered the earliest suggestions of the principle of isostasy, as well as of the concept of roots of mountain chains. Also expressed in Marsili's drawings are the concepts of Earth's spheroid-ellipsoid surface and the difference in thickness of “marine” (oceanic) and “mountainous” (continental) crust. His hemiglobal, water-colored section shows a balance of mountain-peak height and seafloor depth compared to sea level. This setting is formulated in the text as a general principle describing an isostatic condition. Different colors indicate three different types of crust beneath the deep seas, the low-elevation continental plains, and the mountain chains, respectively.

The relevance of Luigi Ferdinando Marsili to the history of geology is related to his publications, to the design and foundation of the Academy of Science of Bologna, and to his unpublished Trattato de' monti ( Treatise on the Mountains ). Additionally, his name is well known among scholars of antiquities because he assembled during his life a rich collection of archaeological findings that today forms an important part of the Civic Museum of Bologna. Beyond his achievements in many different fields, from the earth sciences to antiquities studies, one of the most original aspects of Marsili's work lies in the methodology he developed. He assigned basic importance to field research and to direct visual checks (nowadays known as field surveys), which were for him the real instruments of knowledge. His scientific approach was probably spontaneous, deriving from his long military career, during which he was engaged in reconnaissance exploration and cartography. However, it is not unreasonable to acknowledge that he was also influenced by the work of Philip Cluver, one of the founding fathers of ancient topography, who, nearly 100 years earlier, wrote Germania Antiqua , which stressed the importance of autopic sensibility as the best way to validate the results of field research. In practice, Marsili did not accept a sharp break between the natural and human-caused aspects of land science, which show many reciprocal influences; he studied and represented them cartographically together, with a multidisciplinary and modern approach.

Mattia Damiani da Volterra (1705–1776), “renowned Doctor,” was the author in 1754 of a collection of scientific poems, Le Muse Fisiche ( The Physical Muses ) on two subjects: Newtonian physics and the plurality of the worlds. Damiani's interest in science was precocious, but even at that, it was superimposed on his studies in jurisprudence completed in Pisa in 1726. In 2003, Damiani's lost text, De Hygrometris et eorum defectibus disputatio ( Disputation about hygrometers and their defects ), which was printed in 1726 in Pisa, was brought to light. It characterizes him as a young scientist who refiected upon the properties and limits of laboratory instruments and on nascent aspects of climatology. In this Disputation , a delightful amalgamation of scientific and humanistic literature is pursued. A discussion of the properties and limits of contemporary hygrometers and a comparison of the Cartesian and Newtonian hypotheses about cloud formations are interspersed with quotations of verses on natural phenomena, mostly from poems of the classic age—a prelude to the author's future involvement in writing scientific verses. The poetry of Damiani, which often shows a musicality comparable to that of the poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), deserves to be recognized and saved from oblivion. Especially remarkable is the implicit “multimedia” project of a union among science, poetry, theater, and music. The rediscovered Disputation about hygrometers opens a new window on the personages involved and on the evolution of meteorological concepts in Europe in the context of the then-new Galilean and Newtonian physics.

During the eighteenth century, scientific literature devoted to the earth sciences documented a significant increase in the study of the composition and formation of mountains and above all their stratigraphical sequence. The diverse and widely ranging philosophical theories of the late seventeenth century on the origin of Earth were gradually replaced by new concepts based on field research on both a local and regional scale. This new approach analyzed the lithology and the fossil content of the rocks, the geomorphology of the area, and in some cases helped to determine the chronological sequence of mountain formation. Nicolaus Steno's idea of superimposition of strata (1667–1669) was followed by most of the late eighteenth-century scholars in earth sciences, who developed subdivisions of mountains from the point of view of their formation and also included a classification of the rocks. These subdivisions supported the idea of relative chronology of the formation sequence of the studied strata: the most recent or the most ancient formation could be deduced from its position in the sequence as well as from its external lithological features. In this context, the role of scientific terminology, which was gradually established in eighteenth-century geological science, became very important: the terms “primary” (or “primitive”), “secondary,” and “tertiary” were used for indicating the categories of mountains as well as for stratigraphic units. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the work of Giovanni Arduino contributed decisively to the development of basic lithostratigraphic “classification” of rocks and mountain building. His lithological studies, a result of twenty years of fieldwork in the mountains and hills of the Venetian and Tuscan regions, were also supported by a specialized knowledge of mining. The new “classification” into four basic units called “ordini” (1760) was based only on lithology (without using paleontological indicators) and included different rock types, which formed three kinds of mountains and one kind of plain, in a regular chronological order: “primary” (underlain by “primeval” schist considered by Arduino to be the oldest rock type), “secondary,” and “tertiary”; the “fourth” and younger chronolithological unit included only alluvial deposits. Arduino's system is still regarded by the geological world as being one of the starting points for modern stratigraphy.

In mid-1801, Gregory Watt, son of James Watt, the engineer, set off on European travels in hopes of recovering his health. During the winter of 1801–1802, Watt stayed in Paris and met the Scottish-American geologist William Maclure. Together they set off early in 1802 to travel through war-torn France and Italy, but in Italy they could only venture as far south as Naples, then in a state of anarchy. Here, despite Watt's consumption, they climbed, and descended into, Vesuvius and saw other evidence of recent volcanism. Watt thought this experience would change his mind about geological, especially volcanic, processes. As a result of the trip, he and Maclure saw a lot of European geology together. Watt was then inspired on his return home to make experiments on melting basalt and to study its cooling history and to attempt a “lithological” map of Italy from Calabria to Bologna and the eastern Italian Alps. The first work led Watt to “sit on the fence” over the then much-debated question of the origin of basalt. He believed it could have originated either from the action of heat or from water. Watt's early 1804 map was a brave attempt to delineate up to 46 separate lithologies on a “proto-geological” map of Italy. The lithologies are grouped by color, but do not refer to any stratigraphical classification. The map, therefore, is still at best a proto-geological map. Watt may well have met William Smith, the English pioneer of modern geological cartography, in Bath later in 1804, just before his death, but there is no further evidence. The criteria needed for such maps to be viewed as properly “modern” and “geological” are next considered. Gregory Watt died on 16 October 1804, aged 27 yr. A year before, he became the main critic on matters geological for the Edinburgh Review and there published up to nine reviews, mainly on mineralogy. He wrote but a single scientific article, of which he saw only preprints before his death. This article dealt with textural variation in basalt. Watt's legacy of publication is disproportionate to his significance to the history of geology and mineralogy.