Italian botanist and medic, Fiori worked as an editor for various editions of the Flora Italiana and also collected in Eritrea. Born in Casinalbo, Modena, he attended the University of Modena where as a young student he frequented the Botanical Institute. He undertook fieldtrips in the company of its director, P. R. Pirotta, who was particularly interested in mosses. He gained a degree in medicine from the university and also later graduated in natural sciences before becoming an assistant in the Botany Institute of Padua where he helped edit the Flora italiana.
Fiori soon dedicated himself to this editorial role and, abandoning the medical profession for good, he began to travel much of the country collecting and studying plant specimens. In 1900 he was named professor of natural sciences at the Forestry Institute of Vallombrosa, Tuscany, but continued to work on the flora which, in 1908, was published as the Flora Analitica d’Italia and a separate Iconographia containing over 4,000 illustrations. The original plates from this work, many of which Fiori produced himself, are now housed in the Botanical Museum in Florence thanks to his family. Around this time he also personally prepared a complementary treatment of the woody species in Italy, published as Xilothomotheca Italica.
It was following this that he was invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to travel to Eritrea, then an Italian colony, in order to study its vegetation. Over four months he collected a wealth of specimens and published his findings in 1912. From 1913 until his retirement in 1936 Fiori worked as a professor in Florence and was solely responsible for editing the new Italian flora (Nuova Flora Analitica Italiana 1923-1929). He soon began to study pteridophytes in the Central Italian Herbarium where he functioned as an honorary curator. This work saw the light within the Flora Italica Cryptogama (1943). Over many years Fiori donated tens of thousands of specimens to the aforementioned herbarium in Florence from his excursions all over Italy, as well as 1,300 examples from Eritrea.
Sources:
P. Cuccuini and C. Nepi, 1999, Herbarium Centrale Italicum (the Phanerogamic Section): The Genesis and Structure of a Herbarium
G. Negri, 1953, "Adriano Fiori (1865-1950)", Nuovo. Giorn. Bot. Ital., 60: 1-9.
