History and botany: Pier Andrea Saccardo and his school

This project seeks to reconstruct the life, work and activity of Pier Andrea Saccardo (1845-1920), prefect of Padua Botanical Garden in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. One of the world’s most renowned mycologists, his most ambitious scientific project was the Sylloge fungorum omnium, a work he began in 1882 by classifying all species of fungi known at the time. Here, the focus of the research is to examine the contribution made by Saccardo to the history of botany through a study of his works, like the Botanica in Italia, the Iconoteca dei botanici (Botanists Portrait Collection), an extensive collection of portraits started by him, but also the school of botanists that developed with him, and its particular interest in the history of botany, its leading figures, its locations and its collections. Worthy of mention among his many pupils are the algologist Achille Forti and the botanists Giovanni Battista De Toni, Carlo Spegazzini and Alessandro Trotter. The benefit of this study is that it sheds light on the history of the Botanical Garden and the Padua Botanical Museum during the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks not least to the books and the many archive documents collected by Saccardo, which are preserved in the Vincenzo Pinali and Giovanni Marsili Historic Library of Medicine and Botany.