Italiano
One can’t help but feel compassion for that poor soul called Peter Artedi.
Swedish scientist of the eighteenth century, he spent his entire life studying fish species, so much so that he is still today considered as the father of modern ichthyology.
Great friend of another eminent scientist and fellow Swede, Carl Linnaeus.
Those two shared the fields of action within the emerging science of “naturalism“: the latter would have studied the forms of life on earth, and Peter his beloved aquatic creatures.
But the ironic and cynic fate had in store nothing good for Peter. It was in Amsterdam, where he was completing his research: one evening he was going back home, but slipped and fell into a canal, where he drowned.
In eternal memory of that tragedy, an English naturalist (George Shaw) wrote:
Here lies poor Artedi, in foreign land pyx’d
Not a man nor a fish, but something betwixt,
Not a man, for his life among fishes he past,
Not a fish, for he perished by water at last.
Anyway, enough with the sadness and let’s rejoice with this beautiful photo of two red gurnards and a brill dry-ageing in a INOX BIM climatic cabinet!
If you want to know more about fish dry-ageing, click here!
Photo courtesy of the Raffilù restaurant, in Peschiera, in that beautiful part of the world called Lake Garda!
