Research Interests

Since the 1970s, when I first reflected on the teaching of physics in Italian secondary schools, the focus of my research-work in the history of science has been the relations between science and technology.

At the beginning, I aimed at exploring a new method of teaching, i.e. at explaining some scientific concepts by taking advantage of knowledge of their historical roots. Soon, however, it became a study of the birth of a new branch of the physical sciences, classical thermodynamics, against the background of the rising technology of steam engines (Una strana scienza. Materiali per una storia critica della termodinamica, Feltrinelli Editore, 1979).

Once in Holland, where I taught and lived for sixteen years, I decided to write a PhD dissertation. I discussed my ideas at the Institute of History of Science of the University of Utrecht and the project of focusing on Italian hydraulics in the post-Galilean age grew up. The study of my major characters was fruitful: the newly found documents shed in fact new light on seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Italian science. In the end, it came out a story of the science of waters where intellectual and socio-professional themes merge.

The immersion in eighteenth-century Dutch science, for organizing a conference and editing a special issue of a journal, was also fruitful. Thanks to that, I have learnt the importance of a comparative approach between different national contexts.

The research for writing my dissertation was not focused on the Renaissance, namely on the age where the art and science of waters was born, but on the following age where the new mathematical science of waters took shape. This meant that in my book Out of Galileo: The Science of Waters 1628-1718, which was published in 1994 by Erasmus Publishing, I could not deal thoroughly with key figures such as Leonardo and Cardano, and with the engineers-architects and periti that developed the Renaissance art and science of waters.

Since then – although I continued to produce new work on Galileo and Castelli (particularly on their theory of matter and on Galileo's experimental measure of the 'force of the void'), as well as on Guglielmini and seventeenth and eighteenth-century hydraulics – the focus of my research has been devoted to that. In 2001, I contributed to organize the conference Arte e Scienza delle Acque nel Rinascimento; in 2010, I published part of my new research in the book La via delle acque (1500-1700). Appropriazione delle arti e trasformazione delle matematiche (Casa Editrice L.S. Olschki); in 2011-2012, I wrote an article on the relations between early modern engineers and mathematicians that was published on Annals of Science in the spring of 2013.

After that I have been studying more in depth the age of Leonardo, i.e. the second half of the Quattrocento and the early Cinquecento. On this subject, I published at the end of 2016 – in the Revue d'histoire des sciences and in the Archivio storico lombardo – two articles on the knowledge of Leonardo and of the Milanese engineers on the motion of water in rivers and canals. I also wrote an essay on the illustrated Vitruvius in the context of Renaissance practices of levelling of the waters (Fra Giocondo, Cesariano and Cardano, but also Leonardo and Alberti) that was published in the journal Humanistica in the spring of 2017. And in 2018 I wrote a chapter for the catalogue(s) - Italian version and English version - of the exhibition L'acqua microscopio della natura. Il Codice Leicester di Leonardo da Vinci (Firenze, Uffizi, 30 october 2018 - 20 january 2019), in which I emphasize the connections between topics of the Codex Leicester such as the origin of winds and earthquakes, the measure of the force of the steam and the origin of rivers. In 2021 I have also written an essay on Leonardo's theme of Water, Rivers and Canalizations that has been published the same year in a Leonardian volume of the Accademia Nazionale di Scienze Lettere e Arti of Modena.

In the last few years I have also been dealing with another Leonardian theme, i.e. the image of Leonardo's art and science that was developed from the early 17th century to the 1830s. In connection with the 500th anniversary of his death, besides the chapter on the Codex Leicester, I wrote an article on the origin of the myth of Leonardo as engineer of the Milan canals that was published in 2019 in the Archivio storico lombardo. More recently I wrote an article on the studies of Venturi on Leonardo's hydraulics.