The Volterra cliff in the mind of philosophers, savants and geologists (1282–1830)

Abstract

The Pliocene fossiliferous succession of the Volterra hill, a prominent place of Tuscany, Italy, and since the Renaissance the site of important archeological findings of the ancient Etruscan civilization, formed the object of enquiry during six centuries of research on the inner nature of the Earth system. The works of Restoro d'Arezzo, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Steno, Giovanni Targioni, Nicolas Desmarest, Giambattista Brocchi, Alexandre Brogniart and Charles Lyell testify to the early recognition through fieldwork that those strata with seashells had formed at the bottom of the sea. This interpretation served different approaches to knowledge. Restoro, Leonardo, and Steno, spanning nearly four centuries in the history of science (1282-1669), including the Copernican Revolution and the start of the Modern Age, relied also on textual sources and trusted a speculative model of earth's interior, so that at Volterra they focused on vertical movements of the earth-water system. The 18th and 19th century authors had abandoned pre-built young-earth models and emphasised the geography of ancient Tuscany. Brocchi, Brongniart and Lyell promoted the taxonomic use of seashells to correlate rocks across Europe. This place deserves higher standards of valorisation to promote understanding of the history and sociology of ideas.