ROBECCHI-BRICCHETTI, LUIGI

born May 21, 1855, Pavia, Lombardy died May 31, 1926, Pavia Italian explorer, the first European to cross the Somali peninsula (the Horn of East Africa). On his first African expedition he reached the oasis of Siwa (in western Egypt) in 1886, where he found a vast necropolis from which he collected skulls for European museums. On his two greatest expeditions, he twice traversed the previously unexplored interior of Somalia: in 1890 traveling the entire eastern section (from Obbia in the south to Alula on the Horn) and in 1891 cutting across the Horn of Somalia and the eastern part of Ethiopia from Mogadiscio (now Mogadishu), on the Indian Ocean, northward to Berbera, on the Gulf of Aden.