Roberto De Visiani (1800-1878) was born in Šibenik (Croatia) to a wealthy family of Venetian origin and graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Padua in 1822. For four years he was assistant to Giuseppe Antonio Bonato, Prefect of the Botanical Garden of Padua. When his period of service ended he returned to Dalmatia where, alongside his work as a physician, he devoted himself to studying botany and collecting plants, which he took with him when he returned to Padua as Bonato’s successor. These same plants provided material for his most important work, the Flora Dalmatica, in which he gave descriptions and, in part, made drawings of over two thousand species and varieties, some totally new to science at the time.

His ‘Herbarium Dalmaticum’ or ‘Herbarium of Dalmatian Flora’, donated to the Herbarium of Padua in 1871, comprises some 9,800 specimens, divided into forty parcels. Inside are almost 2,500 taxa, collected in part by him and in part by other botanists who helped him, mainly the Slovak Jozef Pantocsek with almost two thousand specimens, and thereafter Luigi Stalio, Thomas Pichler, Paul Ascherson, Friederich Wilhelm Noë, Giuseppe Clementi, Franz Neumayer, Andreas Alschinger and dozens of other collectors.