SESTINI, Fausto Alessandro.
– He was born in Campi Bisenzio (Florence) on 14 April 1839 to Leone, a pharmacist by profession, and Luisa Vannini. He was baptised Pietro Fausto Alessandro.
After graduating in 1858 from the pharmacy school of the S. Maria Nuova hospital in Florence, Sestini joined the Cascine agricultural school, founded by the Tuscan provisional government, under the direction of Adolfo Targioni Tozzetti, whose assistant he became. He thus specialised in agrarian chemistry and food chemistry, research fields in which he provided remarkable studies. He soon became a corresponding member of the Accademia dei Georgofili, where he read various contributions that were later published in the institution’s Memoirs. In 1861, he actively participated in the first Italian Exhibition, inaugurated by King Victor Emmanuel II on 15 September. The event had been devised by the provisional government led by Bettino Ricasoli with the decisive contribution of the Accademia dei Georgofili, whose president, Cosimo Ridolfi, was then also the head of the Exhibition’s organising committee. On this occasion, Sestini assisted Targioni Tozzetti in the first chemical analysis of Italian wines, based on a large sample (one hundred and sixty-seven assays).
From 1862 to 1871, he was professor of chemistry at the Royal Technical Institute in Forlì. During this period, among many other things, he determined the chemical composition of balsamic vinegar from Modena and its peculiar characteristics. He then began research into the sunlight-induced transformation of santonine, the anthelmintic active ingredient contained in the calatides of various Artemisia species, especially Artemisia maritima and Artemisia Cina (the ‘holy seed’ of ancient pharmacopoeias). From Forlì he moved, replacing Alfredo Cossa, to the technical institute in Udine, where he also directed the local experimental agrarian station founded in 1870 (together with the one in Modena). Two years later he moved to Rome, by then the capital of Italy, where he was called to lead the newly founded agrarian station and teach chemistry at the new technical institute in Rome. In 1873, he was appointed central inspector for technical education by the Ministry of Agriculture. In the same year, again on behalf of the ministry and as director of the agrarian station, he was charged with examining the quality of Italian wines admitted to the Universal Exhibition in Vienna (in which he also took part as a juror), thus continuing the work begun in Florence more than ten years earlier: ‘if the results obtained so far are compared with those obtained in 1861, it is acknowledged that wine production has certainly made appreciable progress in Italy in recent years’ (F. Sestini, Vini, 1873, p. 40). During his stay in Rome, he also had the opportunity to collaborate with Stanislao Cannizzaro on the photochemistry studies started during his time in Rome.
In 1876, he won the competition for the chair of agricultural chemistry at the University of Pisa, where he would work intensively until his death. The following year, he led, together with Antonio D’Achiardi, professor of mineralogy at the University of Pisa and secretary of the Tuscan Society of Natural Sciences, founded in 1874 (of which Sestini was also a member), a famous visit with university students to the Larderello factories, also internationally renowned for the production of boric acid.
Sestini expressed ‘ironic and acerbic criticism’ on the conditions of industry and production methods, which struck many students, in particular Raffaello Nasini, destined to become one of the most important Italian chemists of the early decades of the 20th century, who would later carry out fundamental research at the boraciferous fumaroles of Larderello: ‘those words of Fausto Sestini impressed themselves on my mind: for Larderello I always had a nostalgic feeling […. for the desire to be able to do what had not yet been done for the utilisation of natural resources’ (Il calore della terra, 2005, pp. 249, 278).
During his years at the University of Pisa, Sestini devoted himself energetically to the improvement of Tuscan agriculture, as can be seen from his numerous publications on a wide range of issues, from plant nutrition to the chemical analysis of water.
Very attentive to issues related to teaching (he was highly respected by his students), he produced various didactic publications, from Raccolta di problemi ad uso degli studenti di chimica e dei chimici pratici (1868) to Elementi di chimica ad uso degli istituti tecnici (1886), written together with Angelo Funaro (who was a natural science teacher at the Reale liceo in Livorno, director of the city’s municipal chemistry laboratory, assistant to Sestini’s chair of agricultural chemistry and a freelance teacher from 1883, as well as a member of the Tuscan Society of Natural Sciences).
The second text, which was intended to meet the requirements of the general regulation for technical institutes issued by the Minister of Public Education, Michele Coppino, had numerous editions, often sold out within a short time. Some were also published after Sestini’s death by his son Quirino (1872-1942), retaining the authors’ names. Primo Levi was also trained on this manual, who would quote it in his famous book The Periodic System (1975): ‘our aim was to see with our own eyes, to provoke with our own hands, at least one of the phenomena that were so casually described in our chemistry textbook. We could, for example, prepare nitrogen oxidisation, which in Sestini and Funaro was still described by the not very proper and not very serious term of laughing gas’ (Turin 1979, pp. 30 f.).
He died at his villa in Santa Maria del Giudice (Lucca) on 19 August 1904.
Source: Treccani Encyclopaedia https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/fausto-alessandro-sestini_(Dizionario-Biografico)/