Olinto De Pretto was an Italian industrialist and geologist from Schio, Vicenza. It is claimed by an Italian mathematician, Umberto Bartocci, that De Pretto may have been the first person to derive the energy–mass-equivalence , generally attributed to Albert Einstein. But this is refuted by Ignazio Marchioro in Quaderni di Schio, where it shows that the similarity was a coincidence, and that the energy proposed by De Pretto doubles the one of Einstein's formula. Also, De Pretto suggested that radioactive decay of uranium and thorium was an example of mass transforming into energy.

Schio is a town and comune in the province of Vicenza situated north of Vicenza and east of the Lake Garda. It is surrounded by the Little Dolomites and Mount Pasubio.