Serafino Serrati

Serafino Serrati (18th-century) was an Italian Benedictine monk, who also practiced or taught physical sciences. He appears to have lived in the Badia Fiorentina (Florentine Abbey of monks of the order of Monte Cassino). He is now best remembered because the bacterial genus for a specific gram-negative rod-shaped bacteria called Serratia is named after him in 1819 by the botanist and chemist Bartolomeo Bizio (1791 – 1862) to honor him for his unrecognized invention of a steamboat.