Exhibition "In the Forests of Borneo"
The mentors of the young Odoardo
In 1860 he was appointed professor of botany and agronomy at the School of Pharmacy of Lucca and director of the adjoining Botanical Garden, a position he held from 1860 to 1906.
The botanical master of Lucca dedicated to the very young Odoardo a new species of tulip that the latter had collected at just 16 years old!
Photo: Bicchi in 1870. Natural History Museum of Florence, Botany Collections.
He was assistant to his father Gaetano from 1830 at the Chair of Botany at the University of Pisa. In 1839 he became adjunct professor, and in 1844 he was appointed full professor.
For Beccari, he was an unforgettable professor in Pisa: an entire order of plants is now named after him, the Petrosaviales. Beccari began attending the University of Pisa, where he would later be appointed assistant to Pietro Savi’s Chair of Botany. Ten years later, he would dedicate a new genus of peculiar parasitic plants, Petrosavia, to his great teacher. Today, Petrosavia is recognized as the type of a separate plant order, the Petrosaviales, a group of plants that are both distinctive and deeply diverging from their closest relatives.
Photo: Pietro Savi in 1861. Natural History Museum of Florence, Botany Collection
Professor of botany at the University of Florence, he was the founder of the Italian Central Herbarium (1842), director of the Giardino dei Semplici and the ajoining Botanical Museum of Florence. From 1868 he was alsodirector of the Natural History Museum of Florence. He was Beccari’s main scientific interlocutor in Italy before, during, and after his journey to Borneo.
Photo: Portrait of Filippo Parlatore. Natural History Museum of Florence, Botany Collection
Dear Beccari,
Thankyou for having wished to present me with your dear notes amid your studies and preparations for your great journey. I am glad to hear that you are well, and I wish you every success in an endeavor that will bring you great honor and be of benefit to science and the nation.
(...) I also recommend that you procure for our Museum an adult orangutan skin, of which we are currently lacking.
Filippo Parlatore, Letter to Odoardo Beccari, March 12, 1865. Science Library of the University of Florence (University Library System).