Enrico Adelelmo Brunetti

Who was Enrico Adelelmo Brunetti?

Enrico Adelelmo Brunetti was a British musician and entomologist.

Brunetti was born in London. His mother was English and his father, of Italian origin, was a confectioner and importer of wines who ran a restaurant in South Kensington. A musician by profession, Brunetti was a composer for orchestra and piano. He spent his free time studying entomology, especially Diptera. In 1904 he made a musical tour of the Dutch East Indies, China and Japan making extensive insect collections on his travels. He later settled in Calcutta where he stayed for 17 years. He spent his summers in Darjeeling and wrote many papers in the Records of the Indian Museum. He briefly worked as an Assistant Superintendent in charge at the Indian Museum working on honoraria ranging from 30 to 300 GBP per annum. At the suggestion of Thomas Nelson Annandale he was sanctioned leave to go to England to revise his work on Indian Diptera using the material at the British Museum. For this task the Government of India approved 300 GBP for the period of a year. In 1921 he returned to Europe, spending his summers in England where The Imperial Bureau of Entomology employed him to identify specimens. Winters were spent in Paris and Brussels. He worked for long periods on British Diptera. He fell ill during a winter in Paris in 1926-27 and died in a hospital in London.