Luigi Pigorini

Luigi Pigorini (10 January 1842 – 1 April 1925) was an Italian palaeoethnologist, archaeologist and ethnographer.

Pigorini was born at Fontanellato, near Parma.

At the age of sixteen years, in 1858, he became an alumnus of the Museo d'Antichità di Parma (Museum of Antiquities of Parma, now Parma Archaeological Museum). He later encountered Pellegrino Strobel, the professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Parma and Gaetano Chierici, director of the Gabinetto di Antichità Patrie di Reggio Emilia or Cabinet of Antiquities of the native land of Reggio Emilia (now Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia [1]) and began archaeological research in the territory of Parmesan. In 1863 he began to travel in Switzerland and Tuscany, and also studied in Rome and Naples.

He ran a course in Parma where he resorted to various materials in order to explain the uses and the functions of prehistoric tools. A few years later after becoming a Bachelor of Arts in Political and Administrative Sciences he became director of the Museum of Antiquity of Parma.

In 1875, he founded with Chierici and Strobel a paleoethnological journal Bollettino di Paletnologia Italiana and, in the same year, began working in the Archaeological Director General's office in Rome (Direzione Generale dei Musei e degli Scavi d'Antichità del Regno a Roma) where he proposed to the Minister of Public education, Bonghi, the foundation of the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome, that was inaugurated in 1876 and which bears his name. For his outstanding contribution to Italian archaeology he was nominated a Senatore a vita in 1912 and was vice president of the Italian Senate in 1919 remaining so until his death in Padua in 1925.

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