Bartolomeo Camillo Emilio Golgi was an Italian scientist and doctor.
After an initial and brief interval as an anatomy professor at the University of Siena, he held the double position of professor of histology and general pathology at the University of Pavia for a long time. It is, a few weeks before Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian ever to be appointed in 1906, by the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, for the award of the Nobel Prize.
Born July 7, 1843 in Corteno, in the upper Val Camonica, where his father Alessandro, just graduated, has moved as a doctor. Here he attends primary schools and stays for about fifteen years. In the same period he also studied in Edolo and then in Lovere (BG). After completing his studies in Pavia and graduating in Medicine in 1865 with the thesis "On the etiology of mental illnesses", discussed with Cesare Lombroso, he entered the histological laboratory founded by Paolo Mantegazza and directed by Giulio Bizzozero, who will be his master of research. For the urgent need to find a safe job and pressed by his father, Golgi decides to participate in the competition for a post of primary surgeon at the Pie Case degli Incurabili in Abbiategrasso (founded in 1785 in the former female monastery of Santa Chiara). Golgi wins the competition and, thanks to article 86 of the internal regulations, he is recognized as the special merit of the health professionals to be able to take anatomo-psychological studies.

As a research laboratory, he uses a small rudimentary kitchen, with a microscope and a few tools. It was during the Abbiategrasso period that he distinguished himself for his great research activity and in this sense his friendship with Giulio Bizzozero is essential, which helps him to keep alive the interest in histology and proximity to the university. In that kitchen he set up a laboratory of histology in which, in 1873, he developed the revolutionary "black reaction" (Golgi method). This method allows to selectively color nerve cells and their organized structure. His discovery is known and appreciated in due measure only many years later, mainly thanks to his main mentor, the patriarch of nineteenth-century biology Rudolf Albert von Kölliker. After moving to Pavia, he obtained the ordinary posts of Histology and General Pathology, then he was appointed Chancellor of the University, a position he will occupy several times (1893-1896 and 1901-1909).
In his long and indefatigable life as a researcher he also performs other important discoveries. For example, in the field of malaria, where he studies and clarifies the stages of development and reproduction of Plasmodium malariae, formulating the "Golgi law", which allows you to treat and heal the infected at the right time with quinine. He then studies and describes the precise anatomy and function of the nerve endings of the tendons, called corpuscles of the Golgi and performs important studies on the kidneys, Huntington's chorea, olfactory bulbs, etc.
In 1877 he married Evangelina Aletti, thirteen years younger, nephew of Giulio Bizzozero. The honeymoon is in Córteno, the beloved country of birth in the Alps of Lombardy, for which Golgi will always cherish great affection and will strive to help in a thousand ways. The two spouses will never have children.
He also dedicated himself to politics, or rather to public administration, covering among others the office of councilor for hygiene in the Municipality of Pavia. He is also, for a long time, a member and then president of the Superior Council of Health. It proposes the construction of the new San Matteo Polyclinic and struggles strenuously because the University of Pavia maintains and enhances its already century-old prestige.
More precisely, on 4 November 1893 Golgi holds the official report for the solemn inauguration of the academic year 1893-1894, having just become the rector of the university. Adheres to the list of the Liberal Monarchy Union, or the clerico-moderate list supported by the newspaper 'Il Ticino'. Thus Roberto Rampoldi, a prominent political exponent of the radical left, becomes his direct antagonist in the democratic list. The elections are won by the line-up of Golgi, who thus becomes a municipal councilor. This represents an important result, since from that position the scientist will be able to better assert his influence in directing the attention of the municipal administration towards the renewal projects of the University of Pavia. The feverish commitment of Golgi for the enhancement of the academic prestige of Pavia is evident when the centrality of the Ticino university in Ticino is threatened by the birth of a new university in Milan. On 2 March 1893 the engineer Siro Valerio had disappeared, leaving his patrimony to the municipality of Milan to establish a fund for the university for the study of Sciences. This project was immediately started by the gynecologist of the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan, Luigi Mangiagalli, a fact that provokes the negative reaction of the university environment of Pavia for fear of its progressive weakening.
Golgi could be content to direct the studies of the students, but in him is too strong the passion for the laboratory activity done in the first person. So in 1898 resumed the research activity. More precisely, the studies on the cell are resumed, again using the method developed 25 years earlier. These lead him to the discovery of the internal reticular apparatus, then it is forever called the Golgi apparatus or complex, one of the fundamental components of the cell, fifty years before the invention of the electron microscope, which will confirm it in full. According to some, this discovery alone would have been worthy of a Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine (precisely "Medicine or Physiology") arrives in 1906 ex aequo with Santiago Ramón y Cajal, for studies on the histology of the nervous system: Golgi for the development of the Black Reaction, Cajal for the discoveries made thanks to Golgi's coloration (Cajal had discovered that neurons are physically separated from one another, ie that they interact with each other not through continuity, but through contiguity through the synapse and that they are not united to form a single syncytial network as Golgi argued, then formulated the so-called law of dynamic polarization). With the Nobel, Golgi achieves the highest international fame and his research activity does not cease. Moreover, during the First World War he directed the Military Hospital, set up in the ancient Almo Collegio Borromeo of Pavia and promotes the rehabilitative treatment of war wounded, creating a center for the rehabilitation of injuries to the peripheral nervous system. After the conflict he continued to work in the laboratory, publishing scientific works until 1923. Even in the last period of his life Golgi tries to stem any damage that would have resulted from the Milanese university's imposition. He does not give up and ignores the decline of his physical condition decided in early December 1924 to go to Rome to support the birth of the new San Matteo hospital. Finally, on January 21, 1926, his physical condition became critical and death captured him in Pavia, the city where he was buried with his wife, next to the tombs of Bartolomeo Panizza, his professor, and Adelchi Negri, his brilliant student.