4. Plant Biology Building

The construction of the Institute of Botany began under the direction of Fridiano Cavara, at a time when it had become urgent to provide a new and more dignified location for the lecture halls, library, and laboratories. Until then, teaching and research activities had taken place in the Castle, which was no longer suitable for the needs of a modern university structure.

The new two-story building was completed in 1936, when the director of the Botanical Garden was Biagio Longo, and became the headquarters of the Institute, with lecture halls and laboratories, as well as a magnificent Library Room, in which the books previously housed in the Castle were transferred. Later, around the mid-1960s, important renovation works allowed for the creation of a new floor by interposing a mezzanine in the top floor, and the reorganization of the spaces made it possible to use some ground floor rooms for the Herbarium. During the same period, there was an administrative separation between the Garden and the Institute, with two different directors.

In 1985, following the reorganization of Italian universities into departments, the building became the Department of Plant Biology, and subsequently, in 2009, the headquarters of the Plant Biology Section of the Department of Biological Sciences.

Finally, following further administrative reorganization, with the merger of the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Biology and the transfer of faculty to the current location in Monte Sant'Angelo, the building was returned to the Botanical Garden on April 1, 2014, after about 50 years.

Currently, the Plant Biology Building houses two lecture halls, one of which is a monumental amphitheater, laboratories, prestigious herbarium collections on the ground floor, and the Historical Library of the Botanical Garden (the result of the merger of the Garden's book heritage and that acquired by the Institute of Botany and the Department of Plant Biology starting in the 1960s), whose reading room is located on the first floor. Some faculty members of the Department of Biology carry out their research at the Garden and are permanent guests of the building.