Geology and Genesis in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy: a preliminary assessment

During the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth century the debate on the Darwinian evolutionary theory also involved the Italian scientific community. One of the lesser known results of this controversal reception was the defence of creationism, often supported by the resort to the Biblical Flood, in some Italian publications related to geological sciences. The authors of such writings were naturalists and geologists, but also clerics and parish priests interested in the Earth sciences. They published different kinds of books, booklets and papers, particularly between 1870 and 1905. The aim of this paper is to analyze some interesting examples of this ‘submerged’ and heterogeneous literature, in order to understand the possible extent of its influence on the general public, but also the level of integration between scientific knowledge, geological practice and reference to the Bible, during a period which is usually regarded as a time of separation between Genesis and geology.