Saccardo was born in the wine growing region of Selva di Montello to Elena Vidotto and engineer Francesco di Selva. He studied at gymnasium of the Venice seminary, the Lyceum in
Venice, and then at the Technical Institute of the
University of Padua from 1864. At the age of fourteen, he had already put together a herbarium and had made collections of the insects of Treviso. He received a
doctorate in 1867 and in the same year married Eleonora Zava. He became an Assistant to
Roberto de Visiani (1800-1878), an Italian botanist, naturalist and scholar. In 1869, he became a professor of
Natural History in Padua. He established the mycological journal
Michelia, named for his mentor
Pier Antonio Micheli, in 1876 and published many of his early mycological papers there. In 1879, he became a professor of
Botany and director of the
botanical gardens of the university, a post he held until his retirement in November 1915. He accumulated around 70,000 fungal specimens encompassing over 18,500 different species for his
herbarium now stored at the university. Saccardo edited two
exsiccata series, namely
Muschi Trevigiani dissecti / Bryotheca Tarvisina (1864) and
Mycotheca Veneta, sistens fungos Venetos exsiccatos (1875-1881). Saccardo's scientific activity focused almost entirely on
mycology. He wrote his first book in 1864 (when he was 19 years old),
Flora Montellica: an introduction to the flora Trevigiana. In 1873, he published
Mycologiae Venetae Specimen, in which he described some 1200 fungi species. He published over 140 papers on the
Deuteromycota (imperfect mushrooms) and the
Pyrenomycetes. He was most famous for his
Sylloge, begun in 1882, which was a comprehensive list of all of the
names that had been used for
mushrooms.
Sylloge is still the only work of this kind that was both comprehensive for the
botanical kingdom Fungi and reasonably modern. Saccardo also developed a system for classifying the
imperfect fungi by spore color and form, which became the primary system used before classification by
DNA analysis. Saccardo was the most prolific author of fungal species, having
formally described 6052 species in his lifetime. ==Chromotaxy scale==