In the Italian peninsula, political fragmentation went hand in hand with a profound fragmentation of scientific knowledge. For several decades after unification in 1861, the natural sciences in Italy maintained a strong debt to local knowledge. This meant that the degree of knowledge of Italian nature in the various regions of the peninsula depended on different methods, interests, needs, and scientific traditions, as well as on the type of nomenclature adopted, the degree of development of the individual disciplines and the political weight given to them in the various pre-unification states. In the long process of institutional, administrative, and legislative shaping that followed the birth of the Italian state, the need for a reorganisation and integration of technical and scientific knowledge became immediately manifest. As highlighted in the previous chapter, in order to remedy this problem, the Italian state promoted various operations to reorganise knowledge about Italy’s nature and map its resources, which followed very different rhythms and methods, and achieved very different results.