Antonio Stoppani

Along with Vincenzo Guglielmini, he ensured that the balloons could move over the walls of the city from the Seminario Maggiore di Porta Orientale and carry messages to rally the Italians against the Austrian Empire.

It presents, by means of 32 didactic, scientific conversations supposedly in front of a fireplace, ideas and concepts from the natural sciences, in language accessible to the average 19th-century reader.

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.

[4][5] 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.

[15] In 1873 Stoppani acknowledged the increasing power and impact of humanity on the Earth's systems and referred to the anthropozoic era[16] an idea that was possibly based on George Perkins Marsh who lived in Italy[17] and whose work, Man and Nature, was translated into Italian in 1872.

‘The creation of man’, says he, ‘was the introduction of a new element into nature, of a force wholly unknown to earlier periods’.The idea of a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, was proposed in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer.