1700

Mathematician Guido Grandi publishes Quadratura circuli, et hyperbolae per infinitas hyperbolas, et parabolas quadrabiles gemetrice exhibita, et demonstrata, a work marking the introduction of Leibniz's calculus into Italy.

Mathematician and engineer Giovanni Poleni invents the first mechanical calculator, a gear-driven arithmetic machine. The mechanism is moved by a motor actuated by a rechargeable weight.

Pier Antonio Micheli, Niccolò Gualtieri, Gaetano Moniglia, and Giovanni Sebastiano Franchi found the Società Botanica Fiorentina, Europe’s first botanical society.

Luigi Ferdinando Marsili publishes Histoire physique de la mer, considered the first scientific treatise on oceanography. This work is a collection of results of numerous researches conducted in the Bosporus region and primarily in the Mediterranean.

The first independent chair of chemistry in Italy, entrusted to Iacopo Bartolomeo Beccari, is established at the behest of Marsili at the Faculty of Medicine at the Università di Bologna (University of Bologna).

Physicist and academician Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti, the second woman to graduate in Italy, and Europe's first woman university lecturer, establishes an experimental physics school at her home in Bologna.

Pope Benedict XIV establishes the first Italian course in obstetrics at Bologna's Istituto delle Scienze, entrusted to Giovanni Antonio Galli, who was replaced by Luigi Galvani in 1782.'

The Osservatorio Astronomico, one of the oldest in Italy, was established in Padua by decree of the Senate of the Republic of Venice.

Physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta invents the electrophorus, a precursor of electrostatic induction machines.

Lazzaro Spallanzani confirms, in his Dissertazioni di fisica animale e vegetabile (Dissertations on the physics of animals and plants), the importance of gastric juices and the function of saliva in digestion. He is also considered the father of artificial insemination.

Tiberio Cavallo builds the gold-leaf electroscope, for determining whether a body carries an electrical charge. The device is then further developed by Alessandro Volta.

Mathematician and engineer Anton Mario Lorgna founds Società Italiana delle Scienze, detta dei XL in Verona. Because of the number of its members, the Società immediately is referred to as La Società dei Quaranta (the Society of the Forty).

Vittorio Amedeo III confers the title of Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino upon the private scientific society founded in 1757, thanks to Angelo Saluzzo di Monesiglio, Gianfrancesco Cigna, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

The Reale Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo is inaugurated at the behest of King Ferdinand III of Sicily and realized by the Valtellinese mathematician Giuseppe Piazzi, who was its first director.

Luigi Galvani describes his experiments on animal electricity in De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari.

Ascanio Filomarino, Duke della Torre, builds a seismograph consisting of a pendulum system after the 1794 eruption of Vesuvius.

Alessandro Volta, in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, announces the construction of a battery apparatus.