If you forget for a second about the pandemic and the chaos it has been causing around the world for the past two years, you could really say it out loud: 2021, what a year for Italy. Victories in sport – the soccer European Championship and the Olympics; victories in the kitchen – the World Pastry Championship, which Italy won 20 days ago – and, only last week, a Nobel Prize. Giorgio Parisi was awarded the prestigious prize along with Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselman for “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems.”
Parisi is the 21st Italian to receive a Nobel, and the 6th to get it in the field of physics. Six are also the prizes we got in literature and in medicine, plus one in economics, one in chemistry, and one Nobel Peace Prize. While we celebrate this incredible achievement for the country, one that says “Italian research is alive, well, and kicking,” if you pass me the expression, let us take a look at some of the most famous people from the Belpaese who were awarded a Nobel prize.
Giosuè Carducci (Literature)
He was, with Camillo Golgi, who received it for his contribution to the field of medicine, the first Italian to get the Nobel, in 1906. Carducci was born in the province of Lucca (Tuscany) and remains still today one of Italy’s most extraordinary poets. He won “not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces.” Unfortunately, the poet was very sick at the time and couldn’t travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony. He would die the following year, 1907, in Bologna.
Guglielmo Marconi (Physics)
Who doesn’t know Marconi? The great Italian inventor and physicist won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909 “for his researches and for his discovery on wireless telegraphy.” Born in Bologna in 1874, his work was pivotal, but the Italian government wasn’t too interested in it. So Marconi moved to London, where he got his invention patented.
Grazia Deledda (Literature)
Deledda received her Nobel in 1926, for “her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.” A native of Sardinia, where she was born in 1871, Deledda was the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize and her literature is filled with the images and traditions of her native land.
Luigi Pirandello (Literature)
Pirandello is, perhaps, the most well-known Italian playwright out there. A Sicilian from Agrigento, where he was born in 1867, he was awarded in 1934 “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art.” Indeed, his plays, which contain both farce and tragedy, are considered essential for the birth, in the 1950s, of the theatre of absurd.
Enrico Fermi (Physics)
Fermi is a household name among Italian-Americans because he became one! He was born in Rome in 1901 and dedicated his life to the study of physics and research. He won the Nobel Prize, in 1938, “for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.” Fermi was heavily criticized by the Fascist Regime (which ruled Italy in those years) because he wore a tuxedo and not a Fascist uniform when he collected the award. Needless to say, Fermi wasn’t a fan of Mussolini. He and his wife, Laura Capon, sailed to the US from Copenhagen in December 1938, shortly after he had received the Nobel.
Eugenio Montale (Literature)
Eugenio Montale is one of the most lyrical voices of contemporary Italian poetry, but also one of the most disillusioned. Born in Genoa in 1896, Montale’s aesthetics are filled with images of his own homeland, Liguria. He was awarded in name of “ his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions.” It was 1975. Montale’s most famous collection, Ossi di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), was published in 1925 and became an immediate classic of Italian literature. Famous is also Finisterre, a collection written during the Second World War that wasn’t allowed to be published in Italy because of its content against the Fascist Regime. It was smuggled and published in Switzerland in 1943.
Rita Levi Montalcini (Medicine)
Rita Levi Montalcini, born in Turin in 1909, is perhaps Italy’s most famous Nobel Prize. She found in the US a home away from home, a place where she could continue working during the last war: because she was of Jewish descent, working in Europe had become impossible, and incredibly dangerous. She received the prize with her colleague Stanley Cohen for “their discoveries of growth factors.” She is, in the mind of many, not only an incredible scientist and doctor but also a symbol of women’s achievements and of their struggle to break the glass ceiling.
With them, other fourteen great minds from Italy received the prize: the already mentioned Camillo Golgi (1906, medicine), Ernesto Teodoro Moneta (1907, peace), Daniel Bovet (1957, medicine), Salvatore Quasimodo (1959, literature), Emilio Segrè (1959, physics), Giulio Natta (1963, chemistry), Salvatore Edoardo Luria (1969, medicine), Renato Dulbecco (1975, medicine), Carlo Rubbia (1984, physics), Franco Modigliani (1985, economics), Dario Fo (1997, literature), Riccardo Giacconi (2002, physics), Mario Capecchi (2007, medicine) and, of course, Giorgio Parisi (2021, physics).
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