The beginning of the oil industry in Italy : Antonio Stoppani and the contribution offered by geology

A turning point for the establishment of the Italian oil industry was national unification and the need for new governments to reorganise the mining sector in order to exploit the scarce raw materials on the peninsula. Geology also made a contribution by developing tools that provided a more precise understanding of the composition of the subsurface. At the beginning of the twentieth century, geology established itself as a supportive science for mineral prospecting. Nevertheless, it is little known that entrepreneurs had already begun to involve geologists in the mid-nineteenth century by asking them about the origin and location of oil, and suitable drilling sites. This essay focuses on the pioneering contribution made by Antonio Stoppani, one of the first men of science to be involved in an enterprise of this kind. [Publisher's text]