Antonio Stoppani

Antonio Stoppani (24 August 1824 – 1 January 1891) was an Italian Catholic priest, patriot, geologist and palaeontologist. He studied the geology of the Italian region and wrote a popular treatise, Il Bel Paese (Italian for "the beautiful country"), on geology and natural history. He was among the first to propose a geological epoch that was dominated by human activities that altered the shape of the land.

Born in Lecco, Stoppani studied theology and became a priest in the order of the Rosminians. He was ordained in 1848, a yearof turmoil with the Siege of Milan. During this siege, the Five Days of Milan, he became a hero for his role in the use of hot air balloons to send messages out of the besieged city. Along with Vincenzo Guglielmini, they ensured that the balloons could mover over the walls of the city from the Seminario Maggiore di Porta Orientale and carry messages to rally the Italians against the Austrian Empire. He later became professor of geology in the Royal Technical Institute of Milan, and was distinguished for his research on the Triassic and Liassic formations of northern Italy.

Stoppani was very important as a popularizer of science. His most popular work, Il Bel Paese, conversazioni sulle bellezze naturali la geologia e la geologia e la geografia fisica d'Italia (1876) (=The Beautiful country, conversation on the natural beauty of geology and the physical geography of Italy - after which Bel Paese cheese was named by Egidio Galbani. The wrapper for the cheese included a portrait of Stoppani), presents - by means of 32 didactic, scientific conversations in front of a fireplace - ideas and concepts from the natural sciences, in language accessible to the average 19th-century reader. It was so popular that it went into 120 editions by 1920 and was a textbook in schools. It deals especially with geological curiosities and the beauty of the Italian landscape. He commented on Italians who "know almost nothing about the natural beauty of our country; yet take delight when someone calls it a garden" and that the English fall in love with just one thing and devote their energies, emotions, and life to arrive dead or alive at the summit of mountains. His introduction to natural history declared that "man should never disappear from nature, nor should nature disappear from man". Stoppani like many other clergyman naturalists of the period was a supporter of the concordismo, a school of thought that sought to find concordance between the teachings of the bible and evidence from geology. He promoted the idea that Catholics needed to learn science and that the bible was to be interpreted rather than taken literally. He was also an important figure in "Catholic Alpinism", a movement that sought to use mountains to tell God’s glory. Stoppani was however a critic of the ideas of evolution that Darwin's publication had brought into Europe.

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