Introduction
The geology of Italy as a whole is so attractive and unique as to recall, in terms of richness and variety, the well-known artistic and cultural treasures of what Goethe lauded as the “Bel Paese, where amidst thick fronds golden oranges ripen”. Approximately 40% of the world’s artistic heritage was produced and is located in Italy. A geological journey across Italy is, therefore, an unrepeatable opportunity to discover just what and how many connections exist between the reasons for its historical and cultural attraction, and the characteristics of its stratigraphy and tectonics. The geologist is basically a historian, and in no country as much as Italy do the underlying assumptions contained in this statement prove to be true.
Natural school for early geologists all the way from the pre-Socratic philosophers of Magna Graecia to Renaissance scientists and the erudite of the eighteenth century, and tourist spot par excellence, Italy was also the Grand Tour destination that youth of Mittel-Europa and beyond in the XVII and XVIII centuries, from Goethe to Dickens and Twain, were obliged to undertake if they wished to consider themselves truly adult. On those tours – journeys of the spirit in the true sense of the word – men of culture in the entire Western world, among whom certain geologists of fame such as Lyell, Murchinson and Von Buck, came to know not only the arts and history, but also and above all nature and geological phenomena ranging from the Pozzuoli solfatara to the Alps, and from the Aeolian Islands to the karstic abysses of the Apennines.
The thread running through these pages links the history of the planet Earth to the history of the civilisations of mankind. We have on the one hand the territory of Italy and its natural evolution – so different from that of other countries and so representative of peculiar processes – and on the other, the interaction between the territory and the life of man. Among other things, this latter phenomenon has played a decisive role in the study of volcanic activities, earthquakes, stratigraphy and the Quaternary.
The variety found in the geological panorama of Italy enabled two great men of the past to formulate considerations of a scientific nature already modern: Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Stenone (who worked in Italy as a court physician). We owe to Leonardo the earliest identification of the true nature of fossils, at the time generally considered the result of some “plastic force”, even “freaks of nature”. The Dane Stenone was instead perhaps the true forerunner of modern geology, having been the first to confer a sense of deepness to the time of mankind; he identified in strata present in Tuscany valleys the evolution of a geological history much longer and more complex than had been previously imagined. Italy is where stratigraphy and mineralogy were invented.
What we thus propose are certain journeys through Italian geology and history – brief encounters in the past and present with persons who left their mark or with natural events, to keep alive an awareness of the role that our country, with its felicitous blend of nature and the genius of man, has played in geology. But it is also an invitation to look to new frontiers, and to a new geological and cultural Renaissance in the entire Mediterranean area. May this lead at long last to sustainable growth respectful of both our history and nature.

Maurizio Parotto e Mario Tozzi