Description
The General Herbarium, until 2024 indicated as synonymous with the Italian Central Herbarium (Herbarium Centrale Italicum, HCI) is the largest Italian herbarium, among the most important in Europe and in the world in terms of size and historical value. Typical specimens (holo-, lecto-, neo-types and other original material) surveyed to date number about 20,000. It was founded by the Sicilian naturalist and botanist Filippo Parlatore, who was called to its direction in 1842 by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II of Lorraine. Since then, the Herbarium has grown steadily: it is a so-called ‘open’ herbarium, with continuous acquisitions of plant specimens. The collection has been traditionally divided between seeded plants (‘phanerogams’: angiosperms and gymnosperms) and other organisms without flowers and seeds (‘cryptogams’: pteridophytes, bryophytes, algae, fungi, lichens etc.), with an additional open collection devoted to galls. At the time of the last census (Athenaeum Museum System dashboard compiled as part of the DiSSCo Prepare project in October 2021), in line with previously published assessments, cryptogamic collections were still estimated at approx. 800,000 specimens (sorted according to different classification criteria between the different taxonomic groups): 24,500 fungi (sensu lato), 32,000 lichens, 21,600 algae, 680,000 bryophytes an 65,000 pteridophytes. The phanerogamic collections were still estimated at approx. 3,800,000 specimens (sorted according to three successive classification levels: genera in systematic order according to Thophile Durand' "Index Kewensis Plantarum Phanerogamarum" - 1888 -, species and other infraspecific taxa in alphabetical order, specimens referring to the same taxon in geographical order): 25,000 gymnosperms and ca. 3,800,000 angiosperms, as well as 1,500 samples of galls. However, following the launch of a large, massive digitisation project in February 2024, financed by the National Biodiversity Future Centre (NBFC) and promoted by the University of Padua, counts calibrated to the actual progression of the work soon revealed that previous estimates were excessive and the actual number of Florentine collections (pending final verification) may not exceed 2,000,000 in total. There are thousands of different sources and collectors represented in the herbarium; the main collections can be referred to the authors indicated in the dedocated field. In addition to the ordered collections, there is a large storage room, named after Alfred Chabert, which houses both duplicate materials that are being released and materials (thousands of specimens) awaiting musealisation and integration. There is also a small so-called ‘didactic’ herbarium, created towards the end of the 1980s at the suggestion of Prof. Guido Moggi, never conceived as a stable collection really distinct from the central Herbarium but only as a practical tool for comparison: a sub-collection consisting of a few specimens, extracted from the main series and replaceable at any time, placed in a separate space in order to be more easily manageable and updatable according to nomenclature updates. This selection remained incomplete for a long time after the selection of the first 700 specimens (approx.), corresponding to no more than 10% of our flora, which was in fact never used for the purpose for which it had been set up. The possibility of recovering and completing it has been under consideration again since March 2023, with the start of the research projects for the NBFC, which include the massive genotyping of the Italian flora (DNA barcoding) performed by Milano Bicocca University. Within this framework, this selection of revised specimens of average recent origin can take on a role as a collection of molecular vouchers, as well as a reference for morphological investigation.
Purposes
This is a sub-collection of https://registry.gbif.org/collection/19961847-31f6-4abb-9b92-18a391ba9b0d. Information updated thanks to the internal University of Florence Museal System (UNIFI-SMA) digitization dashboard, compiled in October 2021. The Raddi's Brazsilian herbarium is, indeed, a multiple collection, nowadays spread among, and merged within, the two general herbaria of Pisa (PI-GEN, the main collection) and Firenze (FI-HCI, the duplicate collection). The Pichi-Sermolli' spermatophytic collection, made of 10117 specimens, only spans from 1928 and 1944 (Moggi 1994: 62-63) and was incorporated here much before the pteridological one, preserved separately, was bought in 2007.
