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Before and After Humboldt

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Before and After Humboldt Di Bartolo/Visconti, Before and after Humboldt Before and after Humboldt: Italian travellers, geographers and botanists between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries1 Alexander DI BARTOLO Università di Pisa Agnese VISCONTI Università degli studi di Pavia doi.org/10.26337/2532-7623/BARTOVISCO Riassunto: Il presente articolo ricostruisce, sulla base di una documentazione parte manoscritta e parte edita, il ruolo di alcuni naturalisti italiani di rilievo che attraverso i loro viaggi concorsero alla definizione e alla crescita della geografia botanica, disciplina fondata dal grande scienziato tedesco Alexander von Humboldt. Esso prende le mosse dalla illustrazione dei viaggi di Ermenegildo Pini che negli ultimi decenni del Settecento perlustrò i monti della Lombardia austriaca, avviando utili considerazioni sui rapporti tra clima e vegetazione. Analizza quindi le opere di Michele Tenore le cui esplorazioni naturalistiche svoltesi nel Regno delle Due Sicilie nella prima metà dell’Ottocento sono ancora in gran parte da studiare, e quelle del botanico siciliano Filippo Parlatore, noto per il suo viaggio nella penisola scandinava e considerato il maggiore seguace di Humboldt. Infine considera le peregrinazioni in Perù del milanese Antonio Raimondi che a tutt’oggi presentano ancora molti punti non studiati. A conclusione emerge il ritardo dei naturalisti italiani rispetto a quelli d’oltralpe, e però nello stesso tempo, la loro intensa curiosità e dedizione alla scienza, destinate a formare una delle basi sulla quale avrebbe in seguito poggiato la botanica italiana. Abstract: The aim of this article is to delineate the role of some important Italian naturalists who through their travels contributed to the definition and development of botanical geography, a discipline founded by the great German scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The study, using manuscript and published works, is introduced by the illustrations of Ermenegildo Pini's travels who in the last decades of the eighteenth century explored the mountains of Austrian Lombardy, putting forward useful considerations on the relationship between climate and vegetation. The works of Michele Tenore are then analysed whose naturalistic explorations in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the first half of the nineteenth century are still largely to be studied, as well as those of the Sicilian botanist Filippo Parlatore, renowned for his travels to the Scandinavian peninsula and considered to be Humboldt's greatest follower. Lastly, the peregrinations in Peru of the Milanese Antonio Raimondi are taken into consideration, many details of which have not still been investigated. In conclusion it emerges that the Italian naturalists lagged behind with respect to their contemporaries north of the Alps. However, at the same time their intense curiosity and dedication to science is highlighted, destined to form one of the foundations upon which Italian botany would later be established. Keywords: Phytogeography – Italian naturalists – Humboldt Introduction Before beginning the account of the topic that we wish to present, it seems appropriate to draw the reader's attention to a brief introductory specification with which we would like to point out that the Italian naturalists we will deal with in the following pages, albeit poorly known, especially with respect to their French, German and British contemporaries, nevertheless, provided a panorama of particular 1 This article is the result of a joint study carried out by the authors in close collaboration. Although they are both responsible for the entire content, Alexander Di Bartolo wrote the paragraphs “Introduction”, “The first attempts at a botanical geography in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies” and “An Italian student of Humboldt’s: Filippo Parlatore”, while Agnese Visconti is the author of the paragraphs “Knowledge of the Lombard mountains: Ermenegildo Pini's travels” and “Antonio Raimondi's Peru”. ABBREVIATIONS FOR ARCHIVE SOURCES USED IN THE TEXT: ASM = The State Archives in Milan (Archivio di Stato di Milano) BCP = Palermo Municipal Library (Biblioteca Comunale di Palermo) BMCSNM = Library of the Civic Museum of Natural History in Milan (Biblioteca del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano) DBI=Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 229 Di Bartolo/Visconti, Before and after Humboldt importance for the advancement of natural sciences not only within the Italian peninsula, but also in Europe and America in the period ranging from the end of the eighteenth century to the Unification of Italy. A common characteristic of these scientists, among which we have chosen herein the Milanese scholar Ermenegildo Pini (1739-1825), the Neapolitan botanist Michele Tenore (1780-1861), the botanist Filippo Parlatore from Palermo (1816-1877) and the Milanese naturalist Antonio Raimondi (1826-1890), is that their investigations have taken inspiration not so much from the most illustrious explorers who had the aim of discovering new lands, bringing back rare plants and animals to their own country, looking for precious metals or surveying the trend of the coastlines of unknown continents, but rather by travellers-scientists who, starting from the idea that there are links between natural objects and physical phenomena, proposed to discover such links in order to attempt to weave together a logical scheme capable of giving rise to an understanding of the laws of nature. Travellers, therefore, those we have decided to consider herein, that differed profoundly from each other and in various aspects from traditional explorers or navigators, mostly concerned with specific sectors of natural history2. Firstly, because their travels were mainly the result of long years of work spent at their desk, studying the texts of other scientists and formulating hypotheses on the issues these had just raised or left unresolved, the solution of which was sought in the field through observation and collection of new elements to connect with those already known. The aim was to find answers to the original questions and thus to attempt to form an increasingly and thickly interwoven thread, capable of highlighting the relationships and relative sequence of the objects and phenomena observed, and thus be able to establish a starting point from which to advance new assumptions and thus open the path to the discernment of the laws of nature. A second distinctive feature that characterises naturalistic from traditional travellers lies in the numerous and varied scientific instruments that formed their equipment, and which, though these were often imprecise, bulky and easily subject to deterioration or damage, constituted an indispensable element for the possibility of observing and establishing links between natural objects and physical phenomena: microscopes for analysing plants, vascula for collecting and paper for preserving and drying them; boxes and jars for keeping insects and small animals in spirit; tools for dissecting mammals, fish and birds; hammers for sampling rocks; tubes and reagents for mineralogical assays; small chemistry laboratories for water analysis; thermometers, barometers, anemometers, hygrometers and psychrometers for measuring temperature, pressure, wind, air humidity, and the degree of cooling of the latter due to evaporation of water; theodolites to detect trigonometric points; levels to calculate heights and distances, and follow the trend of the reliefs; compasses to verify the itineraries; cyanometers to evaluate the clarity of the sky, and finally books that allowed the initial comparisons between acquired knowledge and new observations. Within these investigations aimed at establishing the laws regulating relations between organised living beings and physical agents, particular importance is given to the study of the relationship between plants and the climate, intending with the latter term the complex of weather conditions (temperature, pressure, humidity) and environmental (altitude and latitude) that characterise a location over a certain period of time. The awareness of the existence of a generic relationship between vegetation and climate is centuries old and mostly dates back to Empedocle (V century BC) and to Democritus (460-370 BC), both prior to Aristotle (384-322 BC). However, it was only with the observations of Pietro Bembo (1470- 1547) on Etna and Francesco Calzolari (1522-1609) on Mount Baldo in Verona that the first observations on the stratification of flora were made according to altitude3. These observations were resumed by the famous physician and botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) in his Amoenitates Academicae (1749) and in his Philosophia Botanica (1751) and then by the German botanist Johann Georg Gmelin (1709-1755) who between 1733 and 1743 was in Siberia where he studied the relations between the plants of the Siberian plains and those of the high mountains of Europe, including in his Flora sibirica (1747-1769) not only the altitude but also the latitude as the determining factor for the climate and consequently the distribution of vegetation. 2 M. CIARDI, Esplorazioni e viaggi scientifici nel Settecento, Milano, RCS Libri, 2008, p. 419. 3 A. BEGUINOT, Pensieri intorno all’origine, alla storia dello sviluppo e allo stato attuale della Geografia Botanica, in «Bollettino della Società Geografica italiana», serie IV, vol. VII, n. 11 (1906), pp. 1048-1065. 230 Di Bartolo/Visconti, Before and after Humboldt However, latitudinal surveys were not continued in the immediately following years as they required long and arduous
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