Emilio Chiovenda

Who was Emilio Chiovenda?

Emilio Chiovenda was an Italian botanist.

Chiovenda was born in Rome in 1871 to a family originating from rural Piedmont. He was educated at the Collegio Rosmini in Stresa and Domodossola College before graduating in Natural Sciences from the University of Rome in 1898. He frequently collaborated with Pietro Romualdo Pirotta, under whom he had studied in Rome, including on an unfinished catalogue of flora in Rome and on The flora of the colony of Eritrea.

He initially specialsed in the flora of the Val d'Ossola valley in Piedmont, where his family had ancestral roots. He collected around 20,000 plant samples, now preserved at the department of Experimental Evolutionary Biology at Bologna University.

At the turn of the century he was appointed the first curator of the Colonial Herbarium in Rome, founded to preserve the plant species brought back by scientific expeditions to Italian colonies in East Africa in the preceding years. In 1909 he travelled extensively in Eritrea and Ethiopia to study indigenous plants, which made him a global authority on the flora of East Africa.

In 1915 he moved with the Colonial Herbarium from Rome to Florence,