The sea between image and imagination : the investigation of the underwater world from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment

The roots of modern Marine sciences as commonly meant stemmed from the work of Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (Bologna, 1658 - 1730), an eclectic military architect who produced the first "scientific" descriptions of the seabed and its inhabitants. Coeval of the natural philosopher Vallisneri and introduced by Newton to the Royal Society of London, Marsili represents an ideal link between the observation of Nature according to the method developed in the sixteenth century by his co-citizen Ulisse Aldrovandi and the modern oceanographic disciplines. Curiously but perhaps not accidentally, the Institute of Marine Geology of CNR, now incorporated into the ISMAR, was founded by Raimondo Selli in Bologna, Marsili's birthplace and Selli himself named after his ancient precursor one of the most impressive submarine volcanoes of the Mediterranean.