Augusto Piccini (born May 8, 1854 in

San Miniato San Miniato is a town and ''comune'' in the province of Pisa, in the region of Tuscany, Italy. San Miniato sits at a historically strategic location atop three small hills where it dominates the lower Arno valley, between the valleys of the E ...

, † April 15, 1905 in

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

) was an Italian chemist.

Biography

He was born in 1854 as the son of the president of the local court Francesco Piccini and his wife Elisabetta Boninsegni. Piccini had two brothers, Giulio (1849-1915), journalist and author of crime stories, and Giovanni (1851-1903), lawyer and since 1900 Member of the Camera dei deputati of the

Kingdom of Italy The Kingdom of Italy (, ) was a unitary state that existed from 17 March 1861, when Victor Emmanuel II of Kingdom of Sardinia, Sardinia was proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed King of Italy, until 10 June 1946, when the monarchy wa ...

. Piccini attended from 1872 a course in pharmacy at the Istituto di Studi Superiori di Firenze, and then he studied chemistry at the Royal

University of Padua The University of Padua (, UNIPD) is an Italian public research university in Padua, Italy. It was founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers from the University of Bologna, who previously settled in Vicenza; thus, it is the second-oldest ...

, which he completed in 1876.

Stanislao Cannizzaro Stanislao Cannizzaro ( , , ; 13 July 1826 – 10 May 1910) was an Italian chemist. He is famous for the Cannizzaro reaction and for his influential role in the atomic-weight deliberations of the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860. Biography Ca ...

appointed him in 1880 at the age of 26 as an assistant to his chair of general chemistry in Rome, where he was a colleague of Giacomo Luigi Ciamician. In 1885 Piccini became professor of general chemistry at the

University of Catania The University of Catania () is a university located in Catania, Sicily. Founded in 1434, it is the oldest university in Sicily, the 13th oldest in Italy, and the 29th oldest in the world. With over 38,000 enrolled students, it is the largest uni ...

. Two years later, he taught at the School of Applied Engineering in Rome. Finally, in 1892, he moved to Florence, where he was appointed Professor of Pharmaceutical and Toxicological Chemistry at the Istituto di Studi Superiori di Firenze. Kaji Masanori, Helge Kragh, Gabor Pallo: Early Responses to the Periodic System, Verlag Oxford Univ. Press, 1. Auflage, 2015, , S. 268. Piccini was an early proponent of Mendeleev's ideas, which contributed to the spreading of the

periodic table The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, is an ordered arrangement of the chemical elements into rows (" periods") and columns (" groups"). It is an icon of chemistry and is widely used in physics and other s ...

in Italy.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Piccini, Augusto Italian chemists 1854 births 1905 deaths