Giacomo Bresadola - Life

Life

Bresadola was born in 1847 into a farming family in Trent, then an Austrian possession. From a very early age, he showed an interest in botany. After attending elementary school at Mezzana, he was sent by his father to Cloz in the Val di Non at the age of nine to continue his studies with his uncle who was a priest. His uncle, however, considered him too rambunctious and quickly sent him home again. In 1857, his father moved to Montichiari in Brescia to become a bronze merchant. At twelve years of age, he left to study at the technical institute in Rovereto. Having placed at the head of his class four years in a row, he was so disappointed at being classed second that he abandoned his studies to enter the seminary at Trent.

Upon becoming a priest, he was appointed to the parishes of Baselga di Pinè, Roncegno, and Malè. In 1878, he became the vicar at Magràs, a position he held for five years. During this period, he again started to become keenly interested in botany and spent time with Francesco Ambrosi, whoever he was, who introduced him to the bryologist Gustavo Venturi and the work of Carlo Vittadini. Both the large number of mushrooms that he found during his excursions and his contact with various mycologists led to a specific interest in mycology.

Thus he met with Pier Andrea Saccardo, a professor of botany at the University of Padua and celebrated mycologist. Saccardo directed Bresadola to Lucien Quélet and later Émile Boudier, with whom he would have a warm relationship. From this point on, he maintained a voluminous and broad correspondence with upwards of 400 Italian and foreign specialists, a collection that is now housed at the University of Washington.

Starting in 1881, he published the first installment of Fungi tridentini novi vel novum vel nondum delineati, a work which, when finished in 1892, ran to 232 pages of text and 217 plates. In 1884, he left to become vicar in Trent, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In 1887, he was named administrator of the Trent episcopacy's estates, a position he held until 1910.

He became a leading specialist in various areas, in which he enjoyed close collaborations: Agaricomycetes, with Quélet and Adalbert Ricken; Aphyllophoromycetideae, with Narcisse Théophile Patouillard and the Canon Hubert Bourdot; and finally Discomycetes with Boudier. He also developed a keen interest in exotic specimens and published various observations on examples he received from all parts of the world, including Cameroon, Congo, Hungary, Saxony, Poland, San Tomé, and Samoa. Under the auspices of the Italian Botanical Society and the Natural History Museum in Trent, he undertook the monumental Iconographia mycologica, a partially posthumous work which comprised some 25 volumes and 1,250 colour plates. In 1910, he retired and relied on his friends and family for a reasonable pension. Unfortunately, the First World War diminished its value considerably and to survive he was forced to sell off piecemeal his extensive library, his plant collection and his original drawings. In 1927, the University of Padua conferred upon him a doctorate honoris causa and the Italian government named him to the Order of the Crown of Italy. He died in Trent in June, 1929 and was buried at municipal expense.

Bresadola is the author of 1017 species of mushrooms and some fifteen genres in roughly sixty publications, almost all of which are written in Latin. His collections are today conserved in various institutions. The Natural History Museum of Stockholm has the largest collection (some thirty thousand species), although additional parts of Bresadola's collection are to be found in the Universities of Washington, Trent, Uppsala, Leiden and Paris.