Enrica Calabresi

Enrica Calabresi (born November 10, 1891 in Ferrara , † January 20, 1944 in Castelfiorentino ) was an Italian zoologist and professor of agricultural entomology . She was Jewish and a victim of the Holocaust .

Life

After graduating from high school in 1909, Calabresi entered the University of Ferrara , where she first studied mathematics . A year later she also attended courses in botany and zoology at the University of Florence , where in July 1914 she wrote the dissertation Sul comportamento del condrioma nel pancreas e nelle ghiandole salivari del riccio durante il letargo invernale e l'attività estiva under the direction of the zoologist Angelo Senna for doctor of Science doctorate was. A few months before her doctorate, in February 1914, she became a research assistant at the Department of Zoology and Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy at the University of Florence. From 1918 to 1921 she was a secretary at the Società Entomologica Italiana . In 1922 she was offered a curatorial post in Genoa, instead she stayed in Florence, where she obtained a teaching license in 1926. In 1933 she taught at the Liceo classico Galileo Galilei in Florence and from 1936 to 1938 she was professor of agricultural entomology at the University of Pisa .

After the fascist race laws were passed , Calabresi was withdrawn from teaching on December 14, 1938 because of her Jewish origin. The future science journalist Margherita Hack , who was a student at the Liceo classico Galileo at the time, recalled:

"I saw how she was chased from school overnight because of the racial laws, which opened my eyes to what a dictatorship can do and marked a rupture in me: at that time I became anti-fascist."

From 1939 to 1943 Calabresi taught at the Jewish school in Florence. In January 1944, she was arrested at her home and taken to Santa Verdiana , a former convent that had been converted into a women's prison in 1865. Knowing that she was threatened with deportation to the Auschwitz extermination camp , she committed suicide on the night of January 19-20, 1944 by taking zinc phosphate .

Calabresi is considered the "mother of modern Italian herpetology". Between 1915 and 1932 she published 14 scientific herpetological articles. Many of these deal with material collected by Enrico Festa and other Italians in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The African collections come from Cyrenaica , Tripolitania , the Abyssinian Empire (now Ethiopia) and the Belgian Congo . The Mediterranean collections are from Albania and the Greek islands of Samos and Rhodes . Calabresi published the first scientific descriptions of the gecko species Hemidactylus fragilis (1915) and Hemidactylus puccionii (1927) as well as the frog species Tomopterna elegans (1927) and Pyxicephalus obbianus (1927).

Honors and Dedication Names

The Entomology Department of the Florence Zoological Museum was named after her. Streets in Pisa and Ferrara also bear their names. Richard Kleine described the beetle species Schizotrachelus calabresii from the Philippines in 1922 . Miguel Angel Alonso-Zarazaga, Chris Lyal, Luca Bartolozzi and Alessandra Sforzi introduced the genus Calabresia in 1999 . Carl Gans and Raymond Ferdinand Laurent named the blind snake species Afrotyphlops calabresii in honor of Enrica Calabresi in 1965 .

literature

• Paolo Ciampi: Un Nome , Vite, 2006, ISBN 978-8-880-57265-7 . (Biography about Enrica Calabresi, Italian)
• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012, ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 , pp. 216-217 .

Web links

• Biography at Scienza a due voci (Italian)
• Biography on Lettera43 (Italian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mario Avagliano, Marco Palmieri: Di razza pura italania , I Saggi, 2013, ISBN 978-8-86852-054-0 .
2. ↑ Benedetto Lanza on Enrica Calabresi In: Fabrizio Li Vigni: A Life for Reptiles and Amphibians , Edition Chimaira, 2013, ISBN 978-3-89973-199-6 , p. 154.