Abstract Go my Sons, buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth. Look for the various kinds of minerals, note their characters and mark their origin ... observe and experiment without ceasing, for in this way and in no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the nature and properties of things. (Wallerius, Systema Mineralogicum, Preface, Vienna, 1778) ( Adams 1954 , p. 210). Once out ofnature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (W.B. Yeats, from Sailing to Byzantium) Central Europe is a complex mosaic of crustal elements, including Cadomian fragments, Caledonian and Variscan microcontinents and suture zones, as well as Mesozoic and Alpine tectonostratigraphic successions (Fig. 1.1 ). These disparate elements were assembled during the various Precambrian and Phanerozoic (Caledonian, Variscan and Alpine) orogenies, the end result being a geological history of over 3500 million years. Over this long and complex period of crustal evolution, older consolidated crustal elements were repeatedly remobilized and overprinted by later events. Rather than a physical entity, the term ‘Central Europe’ is more a concept of shared history, and in some ways refers to a similar area to that which is defined by the German term ‘Mitteleuropa’ (or Middle Europe), referring to territories under

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.