Presentation

Giovanni Marsili was one of the Prefects of the Botanical Garden of Padova: the fourteenth in the long series that opens with Luigi Anguillara in 1546 and continues to this day.

Marsili’s life, who was born in Pontebba in 1727 and died in Padova in 1795, is situated in a century rich in cultural ferment and dominated by the flourishing of the Enlightenment. The many years in which he was responsible for the Botanical Garden, from 1760 to 1794, are those in which, in botany, the new classification of Linnaeus was spreading throughout Europe, expressed in a renewed specialist language from which the scientific nomenclature that is still used today began.

Marsili, however, does not occupy a prominent place in the annals of botany and the renewal of this discipline attributable to Linnaeus seems to have passed without leaving any traces of his activity. What reasons, therefore, can justify an exhibition dedicated to him?

To his credit could be invoked the careful management of the Botanical Garden: he had the buildings restored, the number of cultivated plants increased and, above all, he created the arboretum that we can still visit today. And it was in the years of his direction that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, during his famous trip to Italy, visited the Garden, where even today the palm tree is admired, the leaves of which inspired in Goethe the idea according to which, in the plant, alles ist Blatt (everything is leaf).

In reality, the true cultural legacy of Giovanni Marsili must be sought elsewhere: in the extremely rich collection of books he gathered during his life, an abundant collection of over two thousand works that risked being dispersed even at the time of his death and that only today, through many difficulties and in spite of being currently split up among several locations, has finally found a virtual unity from which the remarkable cultural depth of its creator emerges.

The story of this library, which finally reaches its completion more than two centuries after the death of Marsili, marks the bridge between past excellence and an excellence of our times.

Indeed, the reconstruction of the library of Giovanni Marsili would not have been possible if, before the owner's death, a careful manuscript inventory had not been drawn up; fortunately, this has endured to the present day.

Moreover, only through modern automated cataloguing projects, and the consequent online catalogue of the Padovan Library System, was it possible to trace the destiny of the individual works and know their current location.

In spite of the physical separation of the two main lots of what had been the Marsili library, it has finally recovered its virtual unity.

Thanks to the desire of the University of Padova Library Centre and the Padova University Library to collaborate in this important common project, the library of Giovanni Marsili finally re-emerges in all its richness in a reconstruction documented by the exhibition open from the 4th of October until the 4th of November, 2018, in the prestigious spaces of Palazzo Cavalli, home of the Museum of Geology and Paleontology of the University of Padova. This virtual exhibition allows the free exploration of the exhibited works, overcoming the limits of time and space of a physical exhibition and offering the public the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of Marsili and his library, as well as to browse a part of the works of his collection in its entirety.

Alessandro Minellli