Botany and naturalist

On February 12th 1886 Eva Mameli Calvino, descendant of Goffredo Mameli, was born in Sassari. She was the first woman in Italy to hold a chair of general botany. Wife of Mario Calvino and mother of Italo and Floriano.

In 1903, in Cagliari, after obtaining her diploma at the Pietro Martini Technical Institute, she enrolled at the Faculty of Science of the University of Cagliari where in 1905 she obtained a "Licentiate in Physics and Mathematics", a higher diploma useful for teaching in schools. After the death of his father, he moved with his mother to Pavia, where in 1907 he graduated in Natural Sciences. In 1915 she obtained a free teaching diploma in botany, the first woman in Italy for this discipline.

With her husband, Mario Calvino, married in Pavia on 30 October 1920, she left Italy for Cuba in 1920. The two returned to Italy in 1925 to settle in Sanremo, where Mario Calvino had been offered the direction of the newly established Experimental Station for Floriculture "Orazio Raimondo".

In 1926 Eva Mameli Calvino directed the Botanical Garden of the University of Cagliari, until 1929 when she returned to Sanremo to work at the same Experimental Station for Floriculture directed by her husband.
The first of a long series of publications (over 200) by Eva Mameli Calvino dates back to 1906, the result of her research carried out in the Botanical Garden of Cagliari on the genus Fumaria, while a year later she published "Sulla flora mycologica della Sardegna", which was followed by a further publication in 1908.

With her writings, she first dealt with lichenology, mycology and plant physiology, then with genetics applied to ornamental plants, phytopathology and floriculture.
From 1930, when she and her husband founded the Italian Society Friends of Flowers and the magazine "Il Giardino Fiorito", which they directed from 1931 to 1947, she dealt with the protection of birds in various articles. For her work on the protection of birds she is considered the "first and only woman" of the movement for the conservation of nature between the two wars.

She died in Sanremo on 31 March 1978.

(source: Marco Mauro)