Giovanni Baptista Ferrari

Linguistically highly gifted and an able scientist, at 21 years of age Ferrari knew a good deal of Hebrew and spoke and wrote excellent Greek and Latin.

After studying metaphysics, logic and natural philosophy with Giuseppe Agostini (and after the usual four years of theology), he was sent to the Maronite college in Rome in 1615/16 – where he learnt Syriac.

The early progress reports at the Collegio Romano are complimentary about his literary and Hebraic talents, but rather critical of what appears to have been his somewhat frail state of health and melancholy character.

It is, however, interesting for its introduction, with its long list of profuse acknowledgements to various members of the Maronite college, especially Petrus Metoscita, and for its brief insight into the working procedures and resources of a Syriac scholar of those days.

[8] He was honoured in 1759, when botanist Philip Miller published Ferraria, which is a genus of monocotyledonous flowering plants in the family Iridaceae and native to tropical and southern Africa.

He devoted himself till 1632 to the study and cultivation of ornamental plants, and published De Florum Cultura,[10] which was illustrated with copperplates by, amongst others, Anna Maria Vaiani, possibly the first female copper-engraver.

He published this at a time growing interest in and structural sophistication of seventeenth-century orangeries, constructed needed to protected citrus trees from the cold of Northern Europe or heat of Italian summers.