Edoardo Zavattari

Edoardo Davide Pietro Carlo Zavattari (21 October 1883 – 17 February 1972) was an Italian biologist, explorer and entomologist.

Biography

Edoardo Zavattari was born at Tortona in the Province of Alessandria. His first academic role was as a professor at the University of Pavia and then at the University of Rome. Zavattari was the author of more than 300 scientific publications. Between 1926 and 1959, he made several expeditions, visiting all the continents for research, in particular in the North-Eastern Africa. The specimens he collected, were placed into 122 packages, two of which are now part of the collection of the Museo Civico di Zoologia in Rome. In particular, he published Prodromo della fauna della Libia (1934).

While he was director of the Institute of Zoology in the Capitoline Athenaeum from 1935 to 1958, the Institute's work on animal systematics was revived.

Zavattari was also notable, particularly between the 1920s and 1930s, for his theories on biological racism. In 1928, during the inauguration of the academic year of the University of Pavia, he argued for a strict separation between "dominant race and dominated race." A decade later he was among the ten subscribers to the Manifesto of Race, the text of which, extended by Guido Landra, but conceived and amended by Mussolini, was configured as a precursory act to the Italian racial laws. He wrote numerous articles in this regard in the periodical La Difesa della Razza, directed by Telesio Interlandi.

Zavattari was a member of the Italian Entomological Society for more than thirty years (from 1937 to 1969). He was also a member of the Turin Academy of Sciences and the Academy of the Forty (1951).

Legacy

In 1938, Edgardo Moltoni dedicated the species Zavattariornis Stresemanni (Zavattari's corvid) to Zavattari and Erwin Stresemann.

Works

• "Materialien für eine Monographie der Neotropischen Eumeniden," Archiv für Naturgeschicte, IV (1912), pp. 1–272
• Il contributo degli italiani alle scoperte geografiche affricane (1929)
• Il Fezzan. Come l’ho visto, come l’ho studiato, come potrebbe essere studiato (1932)
• Prodromo della fauna della Libia (1934)
• Fezzan e oasi di Gat. Ambiente biologico generale, in Il Sahara, parte I, Fezzan e Oasi di Gat (1937)
• Missione biologica nel paese dei Borana, I, Condizioni bio-geografiche e antropiche (1939)
• Le missioni biologiche del centro studi A.O.I. della Reale Accademia d’Italia nei territori meridionali dell’Impero (1939)
• La missione biologica Sagan-Omo (1939-XVIII). Territori esplorati e risultati preliminari (1940)
• Dal Giuba al lago Rodolfo (1940)
• Cinquant’anni di operosità scientifica, 1908-1958. Studi, ricerche, problemi di biologia tropicale (1959)

References

• Conci, Cesare; Roberto Poggi (1996). "Iconography of Italian Entomologists, with essential biographical data," Memorie della Società entomologica Italiana, Vol. LXXV, pp. 159–382.
• Surdich, Francesco (2020). "Zavattari, Edoardo Davide Pietro Carlo." In: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 100. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.

External links

• Museum of Zoology, Rome
• Works by Edoardo Zavattari at Gallica
• Works by Edoardo Zavattari at Open Library