Storia geologica d'Italia

Our country is an open-air geology museum, which nature has built stone by stone in a long process that began nearly five billion years ago and refined over the last 200 million years. It is a fragile country from an environmental point of view, subjected to threats of natural origin, the effects of which are often amplified by the imprudent conduct of men: homes built in areas at risk of volcanic eruptions or built ignoring all anti-seismic criteria, landslides caused by deforestation , flooding due to the concreting of river banks, pollution of the air, groundwater, rivers and sea. If it is true that Italy lacks an adequate "geological culture", it is important that we learn to understand what moves beneath the thin film of the landscape, which we wrongly think is unassailable and immutable. This book was written to respond to this need, and is therefore a book for "non-geologists", that is, for people interested in the environment, mountain and nature enthusiasts. His story proceeds along four stages. An explanation of the key concepts of geology: geological time, fossils and the age of rocks, the materials that make up the earth's crust, how and why oceans and mountains are born, and volcanoes and earthquakes are formed. The most recent geological history of Italy: the period in which it transformed into the country as we know it today. A regional overview of Italian geology: what the Alps, the Po Valley, the Apennines, Puglia, the Calabro-Peloritano Arc, Sicily, Sardinia are made of and how they were formed. A reflection on the main causes of danger from a geological point of view: the risk linked to the extraction and use of some rocks (asbestos, radioactive minerals), the seismic, volcanic and hydrogeological risk.