Part scientist, part prophet, Giacomo Ciamician always followed his own path in approaching the mysteries of Chemistry. Technology and nature were allied in his speculations, and – with surprising insight – the professor, often surrounded by his knowledgeable team, found new ways and outlets for his subject. A forerunner of photochemistry, he even prophesied the use of solar energy.
Giacomo Luigi Ciamician was born in 1857 in what was then Austro-Hungarian Trieste. His family belonged to the upper merchant bourgeoisie and had Armenian origins.
After attending secondary school in his hometown, he moved to Vienna in 1874 to study and work at the University of Technology under the supervision of L. Barth and H. Weidel, focusing on physical chemistry.
Already at this time, he combined the subjects studied at university with his own naturalistic observations, carried out at the Institute of Zoology and, during the summer holidays, at the Zoological Station in Trieste.
This double research track, both chemical and biological, would make Ciamician one of the leading experts in organic chemistry.
His long stay in Vienna (1874-80) saw his first publications on the analysis of the spectra of numerous chemical elements, which were appreciated and even cited by the Russian Mendeleev in support of his innovative elementary periodic table.
Even more important was the research he began, again under Weidel's influence and encouragement, on the chemistry of pyrrole and its derivatives, a compound on which he would specialise and through which he would become famous.
He completed his years of study in Vienna by graduating in 1880 from the University of Giessen, the only German-speaking university that awarded doctorates to those who had not previously attended a high school specialised in classical studies.
Immediately afterwards, because of his heartfelt affiliation with the Italian state, Ciamician moved to Rome, joining Stanislao Cannizzaro's prolific group of young assistants at the Istituto di Chimica. He stayed there for seven years and was able to further his interests in spectroscopy and organic nitrogen compounds.
He also continued to pursue his research on pyrrole, which, in 1887, won him a prize awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. This he joined the following year, later becoming a national member in 1893.
Also in 1887 he won the competition for the professorship of General Chemistry in Padua, where he moved for only two years.
In 1889 he was called to Bologna to take up the professorships of General Chemistry and Biological Chemistry. A plaque still commemorates the house in which he lived, in the very central Via Guido Reni 3.
The University of Bologna, newly relaunched by the 8th Centenary celebrations, was still trying to enlist young, non-local professors in its ranks, in order to definitively sever its ties with the long period of stagnation suffered during the previous two centuries.
In Bologna, therefore, Ciamician was able to freely develop his unusual scientific approach that relied on the need to create relationships between various disciplines and would lead him to contribute to the creation of the Società italiana per il progresso delle scienze (Italian Society for the Advancement of Science), where he later served as President.
Another fundamental element of his thinking involved the role of teaching, understood as an engine of training before education. This idea made him an excellent mentor and a captivating populariser, and indeed numerous future academics and university professors emerged from his classes.
For Ciamician, though, the progress achieved in the laboratory would not have been worthwhile if it not related to a more practical collective and social benefit. For him, the scientist had a moral obligation to ask himself what his discipline was and what it could achieve, consequently participating actively in public life and directing the political choices of his time.
He himself took an interest not only in local politics (he became town councillor in 1918), but also in national politics. Proudly Italian, in 1900 he turned down an attractive offer in Vienna and in return, without having asked for it, received a generous pay rise from the Italian kingdom. When he was elected senator in 1910, the first from Trieste, he was involved in numerous commissions, becoming chairman of the Committee for Chemical Industries at the Ministry of Industry.
His notoriety introduced him to numerous circles, such as the aforementioned Italian Society for the Advancement of Science, the Academy of Sciences of Bologna, various other Italian and international academies and the world's best chemical societies (in England, France, Germany and the US). Ciamician was also the first general president of the newly founded Italian Association of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
During his 30 years of teaching in Bologna, he developed his chemical-physical theories, producing more than 4,000 scientific memoirs and literary notes, with his usual focus on pyrrole, but also on natural products, chemical reactions in plants and the chemical action of light.
For the latter, he is still considered the father of photochemistry. He became aware of the influence of light on substances and therefore, as the laboratories were not equipped for such experiments at the time, he moved part of his study to the university's terraces.
The constant attention he paid to the natural world – which led him to direct most of his speculations to the field of organic chemistry, with an increasing focus on biological chemistry and especially plant chemistry – resulted in Ciamician prophesying alternative sources of energy such as from the sun, making him a forerunner of techniques that are only now in use, such as artificial photosynthesis.
Even with regard to his most famous studies, those on pyrrole, Ciamician could be said to be ahead of his time, as it was not until after his death that the compound and its derivatives would prove far more important than they were in his time.
Ciamician's intuition (he said that there was something divine in approaching science like an artistic execution), as well as his well-known skills, led several of his colleagues to nominate him nine times for the Nobel Prize (1905, 1907, 1908, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1916, 1919, 1921), which however he never won.
Admired by his students and colleagues, he personally promoted the raising of funds for the construction of a new and suitable Chemistry Institute, already envisaged in the Second Convention between the University of Bologna, local authorities and the State (1910). However, work did not begin until 1916, and with the escalation of the war, it was interrupted and only resumed in 1924, coming to completion in 1931.
To this day, Ciamician, who didn’t live to see the new building completed, is nevertheless inextricably linked to it, his name having been given to the newly founded Institute right from the outset.
When the scientist died in 1922, the whole city gathered around his coffin, which was brought to the Certosa di Bologna, while heartfelt praise arrived from the entire scientific world.