The rise of Italian embryology 515 The rise of embryology in Italy: from the Renaissance to the early 20 th century Int. J. Dev. Biol. 44: 515-521 (2000) 0214-6282/2000/$20.00 © UBC Press Printed in Spain www.ehu.es/ijdb *Address correspondence to: Prof. Massimo De Felici. Dipartimento di Sanità Pubblica e Biologia Cellulare, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Via di Tor Vergata 135, 00133 Roma, Italia. TEL: 39 06 7259 6174. FAX: 39 06 7259 6172. e-mail: defelici@uniroma2.it MASSIMO DE FELICI* and GREGORIO SIRACUSA Department of Public Health and Cell Biology, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy. In the present paper, the Italian embryologists and their main contributions to this science before 1900 will be shortly reviewed. During the twentieth century, embryology became progressively integrated with cytology and histology and the new sciences of genetics and molecular biology, so that the new discipline of developmental biology arose. The number of investigators directly or indirectly involved in problems concerning developmental biol- ogy, the variety of problems and experimental models investi- gated, became too extensive to be conveniently handled in the present short review (see "Molecularising embryology: Alberto Monroy and the origins of Developmental Biology in Italy" by B. Fantini, in the present issue). There is no doubt that from the Renaissance to the early 20 th century, Italian scientists made important contributions to estab- lishing the morphological bases of human and comparative embry- ology and to the rise of experimental embryology. Italian embryologists were often at the centre of passionate debates concerning basic problems of early embryology such spontaneous generation, preformism versus epigenesis or ovism versus animalculism. Great scientists like Marcello Malpighi and Lazzaro Spallanzani marked turning points in embryology by introducing the microscopic observation of embryos and controlled experimen- tation in embryology, respectively. The Stazione Zoologica, estab- lished in Naples in 1872 by the German Anton Dohrn, became an international scientific centre in which fundamental experiments for the history of developmental biology were performed (see "Molecularising embryology: Alberto Monroy and the origins of Developmental Biology in Italy" by B. Fantini, in the present issue). Embryology in the XV and XVI centuries After the first embryological observations and theories by the great ancient Greeks Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen, embryol- ogy remained asleep for almost two thousand years. In Italy at the beginning of Renaissance, the embryology of Aristotle and Galen was largely accepted and quoted in books like De Generatione Animalium and De Animalibus by Alberto Magno (1206-1280), in one of the books of the Summa Theologica (De propagatione hominis quantum ad corpus) by Tommaso d’Aquino (1227-1274) and even in the Divina Commedia (in canto XXV of Purgatorio) by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). The activity of Dante’s contemporary, Mondino de Luzzi (1270-1236) brings to the more practical aspects of embryology at this period. Mondino was the most outstanding figure among the Bolognese anatomists in what is really the first period of the revival of biology. He personally dissected human embryos and published in 1316 a book Anatomia in which some important observations on the anatomy of the uterus and on the physiology of embryo formation can be found. After Mondino, more than a couple of centuries must pass until the age of the great Italian macro-iconographer embryologists of the sixteenth century, who