Il Corredo "Instrumentario del Laboratorio di Chimica e Farmacia" nella Libera Università di Ferrara all'indomani dell'Unità d'Italia

The article reports a research regarding the scientific instruments of the Chemistry and Pharmacy laboratory of the University of Ferrara at the end of the nineteenth century, right after the formation of the kingdom of Italy. As primary reference source was utilized the report Notizie storiche sulla Università Libera degli Studi in Ferrara (Biblioteca Ariostea di Ferrara), written in 1873 by the Rector Efisio Cugusi Persi, that lists the instruments purchased to modernize the laboratory in 1865 and gives many other related information. Starting from this script, researches have been made in the databases of local and national museums and in collections of the University of Ferrara with the aim of presenting the characteristics, uses and history of the instruments described in the report and comparing those with the apparatuses now present in the University Museum System. Thanks to documents found in the archives of the Academy of Sciences of Ferrara, we were also able to reconstruct also the biographies of the university teachers and their fields of research, in a way that was possible to contextualize the laboratory instrumentation of that time. To trace the characteristics of the instrumentation, the bibliographic researches were deep and detailed on texts, manuals, catalogues of the nineteenth century. Noteworthy were the Francesco Selmi’s Encyclopedia of Chemistry written in 1868 (Fondo di Chimica dell’Università di Ferrara), the Pike’s Catalogues written in 1856 and the Giuseppe Orosi’s Manual of Qualitative and Quantitative Inorganic Analytic Chemistry written in 1871.