In the decade between 1860 and 1870, our country devoted itself with fervour to its own scientific and cultural renewal, welcoming with admiration and emulation every glimmer of new civilisation, every new current of ideas, as if to make up in a short time for the lesser activity to which the regimes before the unification of Italy had condemned it. While the great political movement filled souls with an exalted nationalism, the new scientific movement found souls inclined to welcome eagerly every international current. Since the almost absolute dominance of the experimental sciences in the second half of the 10th century was linked to Germany, the scientific environment of the new Italy sought by all means to learn that language which in previous years had been hated and rejected in the schools because it had been imposed under foreign rule.