Emilio Chiovenda

He was educated at the Collegio Rosmini in Stresa and Domodossola College before graduating in Natural Sciences from the University of Rome in 1898.

He initially specialised in the flora of the Val d'Ossola valley in Piedmont, where his family had ancestral roots.

He collected around 20,000 plant samples, now preserved at the department of Experimental Evolutionary Biology at Bologna University.

At the turn of the century he was appointed the first curator of the Colonial Herbarium (Erbario coloniale) in Rome, founded to preserve the plant species brought back by scientific expeditions to Italian colonies in East Africa in the preceding years.

In 1909 he travelled extensively in Eritrea and Ethiopia to study indigenous plants, which made him a global authority on the flora of East Africa.