Erspamer was born in 1909 in the small village of Val di Non in
Malosco, a municipality of
Trentino in northern
Italy which was part of
Austria-Hungary at the time. He attended school in the
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Trento and then moved to
Pavia, where he studied at
Ghislieri College, graduating in medicine and surgery in 1935. He then took the post of assistant professor in
anatomy and
physiology at the
University of Pavia – one of the oldest universities in Europe, founded in 1361. In 1936, he obtained a scholarship to study at the Institute of Pharmacology at the
University of Berlin. After returning to Italy in 1939, he moved to Rome where he took up the position of professor in
pharmacology. In Rome, the focus of his research shifted to drugs and he used his past biological experience to focus on compounds isolated from animal tissues. In 1947 he became professor of pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine at the
University of Bari. In 1955, he moved from
Bari to
Parma, to assume an equivalent position of professor of pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine,
University of Parma. Erspamer was one of the first Italian pharmacologists to realize that fruitful scientific research benefits from building a relationship with the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. In the late 1950s, he established a collaboration with chemists at the
Farmitalia company. The collaboration was useful, not only for the analysis of the structure of new molecules which he isolated and characterized pharmacologically, but also for the subsequent industrial synthesis of these chemicals and their synthetic analogs. During his lifetime he was twice nominated for the
Nobel Prize.-1999 ==Important discoveries==