Anatomie einer Revolution: Botanik und Politik im Vormärz von Padua.

During the last decades of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, we assist close personnel and theoretical ties and cross-fertilizations between botanical and socio-political practices and ideas. In Veneto, in particular in Padua, the world of plants enjoyed a traditionally high status and exerted a strong influence on Venetian culture. Therefore, it is not surprising to observe here a particularly strong interplay between botany and politics. In this essay, I will introduce two brothers, the lawyer and politician Andrea MENEGHINI (1806–1870) and his younger brother, the botanist and later geologist Giuseppe MENEGHINI (1811–1889). Even if with a different level of intensity, both nurtured from their youth a passion for the study of plants, and both were during the ‘spring of the people’ importantly involved in the construction of Padua’s civil society and in 1848 in the short-lived revolutionary government of Padua. The analysis of their writings reveals interesting parallels between Andrea’s conjectures of civil societies and Giuseppe’s ideas about the anatomy and physiology of brains and algae.