Review of Federica Favino, Donne e scienza nella Roma dell’Ottocento, Roma, Viella, 2020

Federica Favino’s book on science and society in nineteenth-century Rome opens with commentary on two iconographic representations. The first is a photograph of Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti (1799–1879) which, as Favino notes, was taken as if the botanist were posing in a diorama. Mazzanti is the only woman among the 99 subjects in a collection of photographs put together by the botanist Giuseppe De Notaris (1805–77). The second image depicts astronomer Caterina Scarpellini (1808–73), apparently the only woman in Italy at that time to have had a public (funerary) monument dedicated to her. In a country eager to erect a statue – preferably equestrian – for practically anyone (monumentomania is discussed in Chapter 4), Italy’s lack of iconographic images of (non-saintly) women points to a selective omission that historians can turn around and use – as Favino does – as a powerful historiographical tool. Reconstructing the lives and work of Fiorini Mazzanti and Scarpellini in context, Favino offers an unprecedented cultural, social, and institutional cross-section of Rome between the end of the papal state and the early Liberal Age. Her book is brimming with information, food for thought and historiographical theses of which this brief review can offer only partial snapshots.