Welcome to the website “Atlas of Italian rocks”, administered by Cristian Cavozzi (technician) and Teresa Trua (associate professor of Petrology and Petrography) of the University of Parma.
The website is an “Open Educational Resource (OER)”. It provides free access to a digitalized collection of rocks that can be seen in Italy, in the landscape or in outcrop. The rocks are from the T. T.’s own collection, that is currently held at the Geology Building, Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability (SCVSA), University of Parma. The rocks and their digitalized products (photos, videos) are used for lectures in the two-semester course of “Petrography” that T. T. holds for undergraduate students at the Parma University.
The major goal of the website is to make the rock collection available for a wide category of users (from students in schools or higher education to amateur geologists).
In the menu bar, the rock samples are arranged in rock types:
Igneous Rocks, Sedimentary Rocks, Metamorphic Rocks.
Clicking on the rock type section in the menu bar brings you to the list of samples currently available.
Click on the rock name and a panel divided into three sections will open. It contains:
- the rock description section with
a photo of the hand specimen;
a video that visualizes the specimen as if it was in your hand. The video is available for some samples by clicking the “cube icon” on the upper right of the panel. Use the “zooming in” option to make a detailed examination of the main features (colour, grain size, structure) useful for the rock classification
The video, created by C.C. using a specific software (3DRT), reproduces the 360° view of the hand specimen.
- the Virtual Microscope section with
two videos of the thin section of the rock, that can be visualized by clicking the microphotographs showing the same field of view under plane-polarised light (PPL) and cross- polarised light (XPL) conditions. The two videos are obtained by placing the thin section of the rock under the polarizing microscope and rotating its stage. A brief description of the observed minerals and microscopic features is given.
We have produced the rotation videos for the available thin sections of the rock, using a Leica Pol microscope, a digital camera Optech IS 4K-8, and a computer. The thin section for the rocks of this collection is prepared by the technician Andrea Comelli at the “Thin section laboratory” of the University of Parma.
- sample location
it is given for sample for which it is known, using Google Earth.
A further petrographic technique applied to rock thin-sections is high-magnification scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The scanning electron microscope is an optical-electronic instrument able to supply micro (10-6)- to nano (10-9)-scale back-scattered electron images (BEI) images of the rock components. The BEI images are obtained on a polished thin section, covered with a thin carbon coat. The BEIs are of interest for petrographic studies since they emphasize the textural features of the observed specimen and the inter-mineral and intra-mineral compositional differences. On some of the thin-sections of this Atlas, the BEIs were acquired by the technician Luca Barchi using a SEM at the “Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and microanalysis laboratory” of the University of Parma.
We hope to contribute with the website to promote knowledge and appreciation of the wonderful variety of the Italian rocks. If you want to help us to improve the “Atlas of Italian rocks” website, or expand with your samples our collection of Italian rocks, please feel free to email us: cristian.cavozzi@unipr.it ; teresa.trua@unipr.it .
