Career
During his medical studies at the Faculty of Medicine in Naples he noticed that when the walls of a well which supplied drinking water was cleaned off, the people who drank the well’s water complained of intestinal disorders. After further research he published a paper in 1895 on the antibacterial power of some extracts of mold, making him one of several researchers whose work on a mold/antibiotic connection anticipated the discovery of the drug penicillin by Alexander Fleming thirty-five years later (see: Penicillin - Discovery). At the time his work was disregarded as coincidence and received no further study.