Early Life
Olinto De Pretto was born on April 26, 1857 in Schio in the province of Vicenza in northern Italy. Olinto was the sixth of seven children (three boys, four girls). His mother was Angelica Boschetti (1822–1905). His father, Pietro De Pretto (1810–1891), was an architect whose hobbies included astronomy and geology, two studies Olinto would later take up.
He attended the Superior School of Agriculture in Milano where he studied agriculture and geology with a major in Agronomics. He graduated in 1879 with a degree in Agronomics. Immediately upon graduation he became a university assistant to Professor Gaetano Cantoni, a Dean of the agricultural school. Together they developed methods that helped modernize Italian agriculture by improving methods of crop rotation and analyzing soil chemistry.
When Cantoni died in 1887, Olinto left the university and became a director at a mechanical foundry mill owned by his older brother Silvio, where he worked for the rest of his life.
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