Giovanni Domenico Nardo

Who was Giovanni Domenico Nardo?

Giovanni Domenico Nardo was an Italian naturalist from Venice, although he spent most of his life in Chioggia, home port of the biggest fishing flotilla of the Adriatic. He learned taxidermy and specimen preparation from his uncle, an Abbot. He went in a high school in Udine and studied medicine in Padua, where he reorganized the zoological collections. In 1832 he reorganized the invertebrate collection at the Imperial Natural History Museum in Vienna and in 1840 he became Fellow of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, an academy whose aim is “to increase, promulgate, and safeguard the sciences, literature and the arts”. Nardo wrote hundreds of scientific publications ranging from medicine and social sciences, philology, technology, physics, but mostly on Venetian and Adriatic zoology. In marine biology Nardo wrote on algae, marine invertebrates, fishes and sea turtles. A vast collection of his manuscripts and his personal library is preserved in Natural History Museum of Venice. According to WoRMS – World Register of Marine Species, Nardo is the naming authority for 144 marine taxa.