Vittorio Erspamer (30 July 1909 – 25 October 1999) was an Italian pharmacologist and chemist, known for the identification, synthesis and pharmacological studies of more than sixty new chemical compounds, most notably serotonin and octopamine.

Erspamer was born in 1909 in the small village of Val di Non in Malosco, a municipality of Trentino in northern Italy which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time.

[1] He attended school in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Trento and then moved to Pavia, where he studied at Ghislieri College, graduating in medicine and surgery in 1935.

Using these worldwide observations he developed a theory of geo-phylogenetic correlations among the different amphibian species of the world, which was based on analysis of the peptides and amines in their skin.

[2] The research activities of Erspamer spanned more than 60 years and resulted in the isolation, identification, synthesis and pharmacological study of more than sixty new chemical compounds, especially polypeptides and biogenic amines, but also some alkaloids.

[5] Between 1933 and 1934, while still a college student, Erspamer published his first work on the histochemical characteristics of enterochromaffin cells using advanced techniques, not normally used at that time, such as diazo reactions, Wood's lamp and fluorescence microscopy.

Other chemists believed the extract contained adrenaline, but two years later Erspamer demonstrated that it was a previously unknown chemical, an amine, which he named enteramine.