The Loss and Recovery of the Works by Piola and the Italian Tradition of Mechanics

In this chapter, we look in detail at the aspects concerning the transmission of scientific knowledge of the Italian school of Continuum Mechanics, mainly headed by Gabrio Piola, which strongly supported the point of view of Archytas of Tarentum as rediscovered by D’Alembert and Lagrange. The process of systematically removing references to the name of Gabrio Piola in Continuum Mechanics (and part of his results) is just one of many examples of how some social groups have, over the centuries and in different cultural fields, rewritten more or less relevant parts of the cultural knowledge of a society. Specifically, Gabrio Piola’s contribution to mechanical sciences has been greatly underestimated in both the more theoretical mathematical-physics literature and in the more applied and engineering oriented one. We remark, in the discussion presented in this Chapter, that at the basis of this phenomenon one can always find common features as a sectarian vision of cultural progress or the conviction that the point of view of the own social group is clearly superior to that of all the others.