• PASSERINI HERBARIUM

Giovanni Passerini’s herbarium includes a phanerogamic herbarium, with dried specimens of phanerogamous plants, i.e. plants with obvious sexual organs and reproducing through seeds, bearing the name of the specimen and the collection locality, and a cryptogamic herbarium, containing samples of plant parts affected by mycromycetes, i.e. microscopic parasitic and saprophytic fungi of plants.

Passerini’s herbarium represents the most scientifically valuable collection of all the herbaria in the Botanical Garden.

It provides an insight into the mycological flora of Parma in the 19th century, of which Passerini was and remains the most distinguished scholar; even today, many of these samples are requested for study by academic institutions at an international level.

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Passerini Phanerogamic Herbarium
Passerini Cryptogamic Herbarium
Passerini Herbarium
Passerini Herbarium
Passerini Herbarium

  • THE PASSERINI MICROSCOPE

Passerini was one of the first scholars in Italy to introduce the use of the light microscope, both as a means of scientific investigation and as a teaching tool for observing plant and mycological preparations.

With him, the Institute of Botany at the University of Parma reached a degree of specialisation and research effectiveness that only very few other universities in Italy could boast, due to the level of innovation of the scientific and teaching equipment it possessed.

In particular, this microscope was commissioned by Passerini from Giovan Battista Amici, an engineer, mathematician and physicist, who had dedicated himself to the construction of optical instruments since 1825, making numerous microscopes and telescopes of the highest quality.

For the time, Amici’s catadioptric microscope “far surpassed all other microscopes then in image sharpness and magnification power, and was an exceptional instrument for scientific progress”.

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