Mineralogy and Mining in Italy between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the extent of Wernerian influences from Turin to Naples

During the second half of the eighteenth century the development of mineralogical science in Italy was often linked to mining, particularly in the north-western area. In Turin the tradition of chemical-metallurgical and mineralogical studies was established around the middle of the century, when the King of Piedmont and Sardinia, Carlo Emanuele the third, supported the teaching of these disciplines in the Royal School of Artillery in Turin, which was founded in 1739. Within a program to restructure and modernize mining in Piedmont, captain Spirito Nicolis Di Robilant and four cadets of the school were sent to Freiberg in Saxony to take courses in metallurgy, mineralogy, chemistry and to study the organization and the productivity of the local mines. They stayed in Freiberg from 1749 to 1752. Some years later a special school of mineralogy and mining, only for the cadets of Artillery, was established in Turin. In the footsteps of Robilant, who became one of the most prominent geologists in the late eighteenth century Italian scientific community Carlo Antonio Napione, the Director of the laboratory of metallurgical chemistry in the Arsenale of Turin, also went to Freiberg in 1788. After this travel he adopted Abraham Gottlob Werner's mineralogical system in writing the Elementi di Mineralogia (published in 1797), which was also the first Italian text-book of mineralogy. The influence of Wernerian mineralogy was significant not only in northern Italy. Among the seven Italian students of Werner, officially registered in the Bergakademie from 1776 to 1817, six were from Naples and studied in Freiberg from 1793 to 1795. They had been sent to travel to all the main mining areas in Europe by the King of Naples Ferdinand the fourth. The aim, as in the case of the piedmontise cadets, was to acquire as much technical information as possible for the planned exploitation of mines in Calabria. After this extensive travel, Matteo Tondi, Vincenzo Ramondini, Giuseppe Melograni, Carminantonio Lippi, Giovanni Faicchio and Andrea Savaresi introduced Wernerian views in mineralogy and lithology in the Kingdom of Naples. Ramondini and Melograni were Director and vice-director of the Mineralogical Museum established in Naples in 1801. Ramondini was professor of Mineralogy at the University of Naples from 1806 and then Tondi held the position from 1811.