Resumen de Naturalistic observations in Apulia during the 19th century.: Vincenzo de Romita and Enrico Hillyer Giglioli
After 1861, year of the Italian Unity, a new and different circulation of goods, and then of naturalistic finds and scientific instruments, emerges among the different areas of the country. The south, far from Europe, poor in both material and intellectual resources, goes on finding its reference centre in Naples. In Naples there is the University and so people go to Naples to study and to teach.
In Naples there has been for some years the Zoological Station with the Aquarium, made by Anthon Dohrn (1872). But something happens also in the far province of Bari (Apulia), where a young scholar, Vincenzo de Romita, manages to create, with personal sacrifice, two collections: a naturalistic one and another of Neolithic finds. He goes down into the caves, catches snakes, and walks tens of miles looking for carved flint stones. But, most of all, he weaves an important exchange net with the most important scholars of his time. In particular, he is friend of Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, who studied at the London School of Mines where he knew Darwin and Huxley, and who was back from an adventurous travel around the world with the Magenta corvette. Twelve letters found in the La Specola Museum of Florence witness a decade of exchanges. Finally, Giglioli entrusts him the responsibility of writing the observations on the Apulia avifauna for the making of the First Report of the Results on the Ornithological Inquiry in Italy (1890). De Romita’s collection; which soon reaches some notoriety, is the basis of a series of publications: Apulia avifauna (1883), Addition to the Apulia Ornithology (1890), New Additions to Apulia Ornithology (1900) and Materials for the Fauna of Bari (1900). This last one will be presented during the universal Exposition of Paris in 1900 inside the volume The Land of Bari from the historical, economical and naturalistic point of view realized by the Province of Bari.
