For a few years in the mid-nineteenth century a giraffe lived in the Botanical Garden of the University of Pisa together with a cow and a calf. The curious story was reconstructed in a article published in the ‘Journal of Zoological and Botanical Gardens’ by two researchers from the Pisa University, Gianni Bedini and Simone Farina. The first clue to the animal was found starting from an 1849 drawing by Alfred Guesdon, entitled ‘Pise. Vue prize au dessus du Campo Santo ‘.
Drawing of Pisa by Guesdon, circa 1849. The red arrow points to the circular enclosure where the giraffe was kept along with two animals. The northern side (towards the Leaning Tower) is the New Garden, annexed to the Botanical Garden in 1841; the southern side (towards the river) is the original late 16th century garden. In the drawing, the New Garden appears as an open space, with few trees along the edges, while a luxuriant tree cover fills the old part. A line of buildings clearly separates the two sectors
It is a detailed aerial map of the city drawn by a hot-air balloon: the view includes the botanical garden where, in a circular enclosure, the giraffe is found in the company of the two bovids. It is then reconstructed, also on the basis of letters from Paolo Savi, director of the Natural History Museum, that the giraffe, owned by Grand Duke Leopold II, had arrived in Livorno from Alexandria in Egypt in 1847 and then continued, it is not known well by what means, up to Pisa.
Here the Grand Duke had entrusted it to the care of Savi who had placed the giraffe in the botanical garden and wrote about it to a friend: “He is a male, now lively and cheerful, so that he seems very healthy, he has a cow with calf in his company .. “. “Surprisingly enough, apart from Savi’s letter – says Bedini – we did not find any mention of the giraffe in the visitors’ reports” of the Botanical Garden or any other information on how it lived.
A couple of years later the giraffe was then moved to San Rossore where the Grand Duke had a stable built on purpose which on Savi’s instructions was exposed to the south to reduce the inconvenience of winter. A few years later the animal fell ill with an inflammation of the mouth and died in 1853. Upon learning of his death, the Grand Duke ordered to send the skin and skeleton to the Museum of Natural History in Florence and the viscera to the Museum of Natural History of the University of Pisa and still today the heart of the giraffe is on display in the Pisa University Natural History Museum. «The giraffe was the last animal kept in the botanical garden, a precedent had been three antelopes also of the Grand Duke whose presence in 1828 had been very well documented by Paolo Savi».
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