Description
Already attributed by Chiovenda (Un antichissimo Erbario anonimo del Museo Botanico di Firenze. Annali di Botanica 17(4): 119-139. 1927, & 19(1): 122-144. 1929) to Michele Merini, a priest from Lucca and pupil of Luca Ghini (1490-1556; in turn, founder in 1543 of the Botanical Garden of Pisa, then of that of Florence, universally recognised as the inventor of the method of preserving plants in the form of pressed and dried specimens); recent studies (Cristofolini & Nepi. La paternità del cosiddetto “Erbario Merini” conservato presso il Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Università di Firenze: una questione aperta. Notiziario della Società Botanica Italiana 5(1): 55-58. 2021) have confirmed its age but cast doubt on its authorship. It is a very small collection of just over 200 specimens ‘agglutinated’ on 48 sheets of rough paper, loose but packed in a red marzipan box; a jewel of the Botany collections, it is by far one of the oldest herbaria in the world, if not the oldest: a precious testimony to the birth of the herbarium as a scientific tool for the study of plants.
Purposes
This is a sub-collection of https://registry.gbif.org/collection/19961847-31f6-4abb-9b92-18a391ba9b0d. Information originally retrieved from internal University of Florence Museal System (UNIFI-SMA) digitization dashboard, compiled in October 2021. 1 volume, 48 pages.
