22 April

NEW - Rita Levi-Montalcini - neurobiologist

Scientist overcame many obstacles to win Nobel Prize

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a neurobiologist whose important discovery about nerve growth helped to advance medical knowledge, was born on this day in 1909 in Turin. Levi-Montalcini was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  She lived until the age of 103, having become the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100. Despite Mussolini’s racial laws preventing Levi-Montalcini from having an academic or professional career in Italy, she carried out research in her bedroom at home that led to her discovering nerve growth factor. This discovery paved the way for future research in neurobiology, which demonstrated that the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems are linked, and had profound implications for understanding neurodegenerative diseases. Levi-Montalcini was born to Italian Jewish parents and had a twin sister, Paola. Read more…

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Alida Valli - actress

Scandal dogged star admired by Mussolini

The actress Alida Valli, who was once described by Benito Mussolini as the most beautiful woman in the world after Greta Garbo, died on this day in 2006 at the age of 84.  One of the biggest stars in Italian cinema in the late 1930s and 40s, when she starred in numerous romantic dramas and comedies, she was best known outside Italy for playing Anna Schmidt, the actress girlfriend of Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning 1949 classic The Third Man.  She was cast in the role by the producer David O Selznick, who shared the Fascist leader’s appreciation for her looks, and who billed her simply as Valli, hoping it would create for her a Garboesque enigmatic allure.  Later, however, she complained that having one name made her “feel silly”.  Valli was born in Pola, Istria, then part of Italy (now Pula, Croatia), in 1921. Read more…

Vittorio Jano - motor racing engineer

Genius behind the success of Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari

Born on this day in 1891, Vittorio Jano was among the greatest engine designers in motor racing history.  Jano's engines powered cars for Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari during a career that spanned four decades, winning numerous Grand Prix races.  The legendary Argentinian Juan Manuel Fangio won the fourth of his five Formula One world championships in Jano's Lancia-Ferrari D50, in 1956.  Almost 30 years earlier, Jano's Alfa Romeo P2 won the very first Grand Prix world championship in 1925, while its successor, the P3, scored a staggering 46 race wins between 1932 and 1935.  He worked for Ferrari from the mid-50s onwards, where his greatest legacy was the V-8 Dino engine, which was the staple of Ferrari cars on the track and the road between 1966 and 2004.  Jano's parents were from Hungary, but settled in Italy. Read more…

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Fiorenza Cossotto - operatic mezzo-soprano

Career overshadowed by story of ‘row’ with Maria Callas

Fiorenza Cossotto, a singer considered one of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1935 in Crescentino in Piedmont.  Cossotto was hailed for her interpretations of the major mezzo and contralto roles from mid-19th-century Italian operas, particularly those of Giuseppe Verdi such as Aida, Il trovatore and Don Carlos, but also Gaetano Donizetti, Amilcare Ponchielli, Vincenzo Bellini and the other important composers of the day.  Yet she is often remembered for a supposed spat with Maria Callas that led the Greek-American soprano to walk off the stage during her final performance at the Opéra in Paris of her signature role in Bellini’s Norma in 1965.  The incident in question took place immediately after Callas, as Norma, and Cossotto, as Adalgisa, had joined in their duet ‘Mira, o Norma’.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Rita Levi-Montalcini: Pioneer & Ambassador of Science, by Francesca Valente

“My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife.” - Rita Levi-Montalcini.  Self-assured from an early age, Rita knew that she was cut out for a number of other roles and the difference she could make in the lives of others. Prevailing over her father’s traditional values, she attended medical school and continued to study the development of the nervous system after graduating. But as a Jew in Fascist Italy, her work came to a halt with discriminatory race laws and again later, when she was forced into hiding from the Nazis. In a makeshift lab built from black-market items, Rita continued her research in a small space she shared with her family. Rita Levi-Montalcini: Pioneer & Ambassador of Science describes how her courage to accept a fellowship in the United States when she didn’t speak the language was repaid when her six-month stay stretched into 33 years. When, at 77 years old, she and Stanley Cohen won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of nerve growth factor - now used in search of cures for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases - Rita felt like her life was just beginning. Over the next two decades, she spoke around the globe as an ambassador for science and humanitarianism and accomplished more than most do during an entire lifetime.

Dr Francesca Valente is an author, journalist, cultural mediator, editor, film-maker and translator. She has lectured at universities in California and Rome. 

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