Emerico Luna, an anatomist and a fervid intellectual

On 11 March 2004, the Section of Human Anatomy of Palermo was dedicated and registered to the anatomist Emerico Luna (Palermo 1882-1963) with a ceremony (moderated by Giovanni Zummo) with the participation of institutional personalities and Italian anatomists. Luna, who was an acute morphologist and a scholar of Riccardo Versari (1865-1943), was the continuator of Francesco Todaro's Anatomical School and occupied the Chair at the University of Palermo that had belonged to Levi since 1919. His wide histo-anatomical culture culminates in the collaboration to the "Trattato di Neurologia", the richly composed treatise by Bertelli (1931). Then his studies and his teaching reached to the Anatomia clinica regionale (1951). In charge of Histology and Normal Human Anatomy in 1920-21, he became a full professor and a master till 1952. He had so many students: among them Ignazio Fàzzari (1889-1986) who had the chair in the University of Florence, Alberto Monroy who had the charge of Compared Anatomy in the University of Palermo and Arcangelo Pasqualino from Marineo. Luna was co-founder and leader of the "Italian Society of Anatomy". He developed an intense research above all on the nervous system, the connective tissues, the arteries of the brain, and the experimental embryology, developing the radiological and clinical anatomy. He also dedicated himself to literature writing in 1953, among the scientific and literary works, a booklet titled Alla fiera delle fantasie where he discuss the fantasy in a style that recall the literary evasion of the last period of crepuscolarism.