19.11.2025
Announcement of a lecture on Visiani
The Society for the Preservation of Šibenik Heritage “Juraj Dalmatinac” is organizing this year’s sixth lecture as part of the project “Šibenik Cultural Heritage”. The lecture entitled “Botanical Heritage of Robert Visiani” will be held by landscape architect Igor Belamarić on Friday, November 21 at 7 pm in the multimedia hall.
The lecture will be dedicated to the exceptional scientific and cultural heritage of our most prominent botanist Robert Visiani. The lecturer and topic will be announced by Jolanda Krnić Zmijanović, a member of the Society for the Preservation of Šibenik Heritage “Juraj Dalmatinac”.
Robert Visiani was born in 1800 in Šibenik. In the early 1820s he studied medicine at the University of Padua, and already during that period he focused on the science of botany. He collected herbarium specimens, researched the plant diversity of Dalmatia and prepared the ground for his life’s work. In 1836 he succeeded his mentor, Giuseppe Antonio Bonati, as head of the Botanical Garden in Padua. He significantly expanded the garden by introducing numerous new plant species from all over the world, and a year later he became a university professor, taking over the newly established chair of botany at the University. Together with Andrea Saccarda he published the Catalogo delle piante del Veneto, and with his student Andrea Massalonga he was the first in Italy to study fossil plants.
His major work Flora Dalmatica – published in Leipzig in three volumes (1842, 1847, 1852) – represents the first systematic synthesis of the wild flora of Dalmatia with descriptions of over 2500 plant species. During the lecture, we will also consider the current taxonomic status of the species that Visiani first described: how new research has influenced their names and classification. In 1877, Visiani left his chair at the University, and a year later he died in Padua. His remains were transferred to the cemetery in Šibenik.