ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

'Nudar di Poesia le venerande mura’: Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti and the defense of the Colosseum’s flora (1870-1878)

• In Event: Hidden Botanical Cultures: Networks, Gender, and Exile in the Making of Botany in the Italian Peninsula (18th-20th centuries) | Sponsored by the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)

English Abstract

An icon of the Roman Empire’s urban magnificence and engineering splendour, the Colosseum of Rome was not only one of the main attractions of the nineteenth-century Grand Tour but also an extraordinary reservoir of biodiversity. In 1643, the botanist Domenico Panaroli compiled an inventory of the plant species growing on the site, listing 337 of them. In 1855, the British physician Richard Deakin recorded an even greater proliferation of flora, describing 420 species inside the monument.

After the unification of Italy and the transfer of the capital to Rome (1871), this vegetation became the subject of heated debate between the supporters of the traditional papal government and the advocates of the new Kingdom of Italy. What some regarded as a glorious vestige of ‘Roman’ heritage, the new Kingdom sought to eradicate as mere ‘weeds’ in the name of hygiene and urban decorum.

The cryptogamologist Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti (1799-1848), a fervent neo-Guelph, stood at the forefront of this struggle in the final years of her life. She pursued this battle – both scientific and political – through the pages of the journal of the Pontifical Academy of the New Lincei, of which she was the only female member. My contribution aims to reconstruct this episode as part of the broader nineteenth-century debate between ‘civilised nature’ and ‘urban nature’.

Author

• Federica Favino, La Sapienza University