Italia - Geologia in rilievo: un ritorno al futuro

Marco Pantaloni (1), Corrado Venturini (2), Andrea Bonomo (3) & Augusto Persico (3)
(1) Servizio Geologico d'Italia, ISPRA, via V. Brancati 48 - 00144 Roma. orcid: 0000-0002-8148-9164. (2) Dipartimento BiGeA, Università di Bologna. (3) Global Map & S.EL.CA, Firenze. Corresponding author e-mail: marco.pantaloni@isprambiente.it

The tradition of “geological relief maps” in Italy dates back to the first decades of the 20th century, when both the R. Ufficio Geologico and the Istituto Geografico Militare created some geological relief maps of specific areas of the Italian territory, for educational purposes or for museum exhibitions. This tradition, which has led to the creation of dozens of beautiful geological relief maps, has been lost over time, perhaps due to the high cost involved and the loss of specific skills. Today, this activity has been resumed through the realization of a new relief geological map of the entire Italian territory at 1:1,250,000 scale, believing that a synthetic scale map is an important tool for scientific information and geological dissemination. “Italy - Geology in relief” represents the first example of reproduction of the geological characteristics of the entire Italian territory on a 3D support, following a didactic and popular approach aimed at the dissemination of scientific content. It represents the only example in the world of reproduction of geological characters on a national scale on a three-dimensional support. The data used to create this innovative geological 3D relief map derive from the re-elaboration of the Geological Map of Italy at 1:1,000,000 scale (Servizio Geologico d’Italia, 2011), from various synthetic geological maps (Bigi et al., 1990-92; Funiciello et al., 1981) and from the geological maps at 1:50,000 scale produced within the CARG project. In developing this product, particular care was taken to apply strategies and tools useful for education and dissemination, with the goal to enabling potential end-users to fully understand the high scientific content of this particular cartographic product. For this reason, the chronostratigraphic legend has been arranged in a “self-referential” way, thus ensuring a rapid identification of rock successions and their main features.

Geological map of Italy, relief geological map, education and dissemination, 3D submarine morphology.