Herbaria, collections of distended and dried plants mounted on sheets of paper, are an essential working material for botanists, along with research notebooks and loose notes. In many cases, samples of dried plants are complemented by information about the plant and more or less extensive notes about the environment from which it came. Furthermore, botanists very often add other types of information such as personal observations, diagnostic characters that may be lost during drying, ethnobotanical notes, etc. Thus, the herbarium becomes, beyond an official record of research, also a personal document recording the botanists’ thoughts and reflections. The sheets of paper in the herbaria also keep hidden information, so to speak, that is outside the world of research, referring to epistolary relationships and lists of expenses that botanists incurred in the course of their work.

The paper, the writing, the erasures, and the additions of image clippings constitute a very special form of organization of botanical research and thinking, which is usually neglected in favor of the more properly literary part of scientific inquiry, the notebooks and/or notes. The seminar will illustrate different aspects of the annotations discovered in Neapolitan herbaria produced from the 16th to the 20th century.