My paper will explore the contribution offered by Antonio Stoppani (1824-1891) to the popularisation of geology by focusing attention on his most successful work, The Beautiful Country (Il bel Paese), published in 1876. Stoppani was primarily a geologist and palaeontologist, but, as a catholic priest and patriot, he was highly aware that science ought to be taught and popularised at all social levels. Although his first contributions were specialist palaeontological and geological works, his attention to the field of science popularisation emerged during the Sixties with the publication of the Course of Geology, a manual derived from his courses for engineering students at the Polytechnic Institute in Milan. The Course was the first Italian manual devoted to earth sciences and it had the credit to make geology an «almost popular science» (A. M. Cornelio, Vita di Antonio Stoppani, Torino, UTET, 1898, p. 121). Stoppani’s fame, however, is mainly associated with The Beautiful Country, a piece of work that highlights his accomplishments as a science populariser and contributed to the process of the Italian Risorgimento. Indeed, this book spread knowledge of the Italian peninsula – in terms of its physical, geographical and geological aspects - throughout the new Italian State. However, Stoppani’s book did not reap such extraordinary success in Italy purely because of its contents. In fact, its publishing triumph has textual reasons such as a strong constant use of orality, a form of dialogue that follows the traditional catechetical model, connections to literature for children, odeporic literature, guidebooks, didactic literature and extracurricular literature. On one hand the book takes shape as an adventure novel through the story of the naturalist uncle’s travels and experiences, on the other hand it serves as a little encyclopaedia by virtue of its numerous digressions moving from the field of physics to chemistry, and from zoology and palaeontology to history, morality and religion. Thanks to its rethoric as well as its content, The Beautiful Country contributed to filling a literary gap in a culture that had shown little insight into geological-geographical issues.