This exceptional publication, published by Antiga Edizioni, offers the opportunity to highlight several significant aspects. First the extraordinary Ernesto Riva‘s expertise, president of Unifarco, member of the International Academy and Society International History of Pharmacy, in the broad context of plant medicines from the Dolomites area, Italy its profound botanical culture and the passion, he has had for years, for the classification of each specimen, patiently collected, photographed and dried, according to the most ancient and consolidated rules for the perfect conservation of flowers and plants.

The idea of collecting them and preserving them in a dry state was born towards the end of the 70s when, after a few years of running the pharmacy inherited from his father, he decided to put his herbal knowledge to good use in a family and university environment. Essentially the herbarium alluded to in the title is Ernesto Riva’s herbarium which, begun at the end of the seventies of the twentieth century, includes around two hundred dried medicinal plants from the Dolomites area and is accompanied by five thousand photographic images, in slides, relating to the same plants, in the various phases of their life and in their natural environment.

To complete the work and make it therapeutically and botanically relevant, Riva, using a rigorous scientific method, has indicated the name, family, genus, species and popular denomination for each plant. He inserted an essential drawn image, a brief description, the dried specimen, plus photographs of the specimen in full vegetation and described its pharmacological potential, in Italian and English, taken from the most accredited texts, from the present and the past, such as The theoretical and practical Pharmacology or Italian Pharmacopoeia by G. Orosi, the Discourses by P. A. Mattioli, the Lessons of Pharmacognosia by G. Fassina, the Précis de Phytotherapie by H. Leclerc, the Dictionary or universal treatise on simple drugs by N. Lemery, Pharmaceutical botany by E. Mangini, Medicinal plants in medical therapy, by G. Penso, the Eclectic Manual of New Remedies, by G. Ruspini, the Pharmaceutical Botany by F. Sappa, the Medicinal Plants, Chemistry, Pharmacology and Therapy by R. Benigni, C. Capra, P.E. Cattani and the Chemistry and Pharmacology of Medicinal Plants by M. Pedretti.

The book was presented during the event ‘Rassegna in Villa’ a Villa di Modolo (Miari-Fulcis) in Belluno, Italy. The villa is one of the 15 main villas of the province of Belluno, Italy and is included in the catalog of one hundred Venetian villas by Antonio Canova. Over the entrance, the garden of the Villa introduces a grandiose estate built in the early 19th Century by architect Andrea Miari and is one of the most beautiful examples of a Venetian villa in the Alpine area with a wonderful view to the Dolomites and from where some walking paths can start to discover the herbs described in the book.