Exhibition "In the Forests of Borneo"
Giacomo Doria
Portrait of Giacomo Doria. Civic Museum of Natural History “G. Doria,” Genoa.
Naturalist, zoologist, founder and director of the Natural History Museum of Genoa
La Spezia, November 1, 1840 – Borzoli, September 19, 1913
The youngest of four children of the marquises Giorgio Doria and Teresa Durazzo, he developed a passion for the natural sciences during his formative years. In his hometown of La Spezia, together with his brother Marcello, he began studying and collecting mollusks and met the future geologist Giovanni Cappellini.
At the age of twenty-one, he participated in the Italian diplomatic mission to Persia, departing from Genoa in 1862, alongside the zoologists Michele Lessona and Filippo De Filippi.
In Bologna, in 1864, he met Odoardo Beccari, with whom he decided the following year to travel to Borneo. The journey, organized privately and without official support, ended for Doria the following year when, due to health reasons, he was forced to return to Italy, leaving Beccari to continue the research alone until 1868.
Upon his return, Beccari wrote:
The botanical collections are with me, except for some that I have given to the Central Herbarium of Florence. The zoological collections will be part of the new Civic Museum of Genoa, to which Doria, its director, has donated not only all those from Borneo but also many others that he had lovingly and at great expense been gathering for a long time.
Odoardo Beccari, 1868
Doria’s dream of founding a Natural History Museum, to preserve and study all the collections and specimens gathered during his numerous expeditions, was realized on March 25th, 1867, when the Villetta Dinegro at Acquasola was designated for this purpose. Soon, the museum’s library became one of the main bibliographic centers in Italy for zoology.
The new museum (the current building) was constructed starting in 1905 and completed five years later, with the transfer of collections from the previous location. The inauguration took place on December 17th, 1912, but Doria was unable to attend due to his health. He passed away the following year in Borzoli.
Only with peace do the sciences and Geography advance more than anything else. [...] The most fortunate, daring, and expensive geographic explorations have rarely cost as much as it takes to build one of our colossal cannons. Therefore, every scientific congress should begin with a hymn to peace, with an appeal to the brotherhood of all scholars of science, whatever their field.
[Chronicles of the Commemoration of the Fourth Columbian Centenary (1892), Speech by Marquis G. Doria, pp. 378 ff.]
Discover more on the website of the Natural History Museum of Genoa (in Italian)