Description
Main ancillary collection (‘Carpoteca’) The term ‘carpoteca’, which in the strict sense would only indicate a fruit collection, is generically used to indicate a collection of plant specimens of various kinds (fruit, seeds, inflorescences, stem portions and tissues, artefacts, extracts etc.) which, due to their size, shape, composition or structure are preserved in jars or boxes, either dry or ‘in the wet’ (typically alcoholic solution) rather than fixed on herbarium sheets. With its approximately 17,000 specimens, this Carpoteca is the largest in Italy and one of the most important in the world both scientifically and historically. Small in number ,but significant, are the specimens that are not strictly botanical (viruses, prokaryotes, nematodes, insects etc.). Their placement in the collection is however justified by the fact that, with very few exceptions, they are organisms that are either 1) historically linked to the study of Botany, or 2) linked to the plant world by symbiotic relationships (parasites, mutualistic symbionts etc.). Particularly valuable and worthy of special mention are, finally, the specimens belonging to the so-called ‘Old Museum Collection’, a miscellany of organs and plant products set up for educational and popular purposes even before the foundation of the Central Italian Herbarium and inherited as such, mostly still in their original containers, from the Medici and Lorraine collections. Thanks to a comprehensive paper catalogue commissioned in the 1990s and 2000s with the contribution of various students and trainees, it was possible to achieve an almost complete digital cataloguing of the ancillary collections, now (2024) nearing completion. The same tool made it possible to accurately quantify, at the date of the census for the museum dashboard (October 2021), the quantity and quality of the exhibits, as 12,857 dry specimens (4 prokaryotes, 76 insects/flora, 475 fungi, 120 lichens, 89 algae, 39 bryophytes, 62 pteridophytes, 1. 100 gymnosperms and 10,892 angiosperms) and 4,115 ‘wet’ specimens (1 virus, 16 prokaryotes, 2 poriferous, 2 nematodes, 76 insects/galls, 2 bird's nests, 946 fungi, 10 lichens, 43 algae, 10 bryophytes, 10 pteridophytes, 109 gymnosperms and 2,888 angiosperms).
