Chapter X: The Science Fiction Dream
From Chemical Plants to Nuclear Energy, 1961
The decision that would reshape my entire life began with a notice posted on the bulletin board where our high school graduation results were displayed. In those final months at Rovigo, a small group of us had formed a reading circle devoted to science fiction - a genre that was gaining popularity in Italy through translations of major American and British authors and through successful films like "The War of the Worlds" and "Forbidden Planet."
These readings, combined with my studies in chemistry and physics, had ignited a powerful fascination with nuclear energy. The atom represented not just scientific achievement but the very future of human civilization. When I saw the CNEN (Comitato Nazionale Energia Nucleare) scholarship announcement, it felt like destiny calling. Here was a chance to participate in the most advanced scientific research of our time, to work with technologies that seemed to emerge directly from the science fiction novels we had been devouring.
The Crossroads: Security vs. Adventure
My mother was not pleased with this choice, which would take me away from Ferrara and the family for at least a year. Pietro, ever practical, told me to weigh all aspects carefully. The alternative was a standard position for my diploma in chemistry at a large chemical production company just outside Ferrara - the same path chosen by my companions Cesare and Lorenzo. Economically, the two positions were equivalent; in fact, the industrial chemistry position offered more stability since the CNEN was only offering a one-year scholarship with the possibility of employment afterward.
Even today, I'm not entirely sure why I made that choice. Something in me felt different, restless, eager to test myself with something risky but fascinating like nuclear physics and engineering in the early 1960s. The conventional path felt too small, too predictable for the person I was becoming. I applied to the CNEN competition and was called to Milan for an interview that went well enough to earn me the scholarship.
I was offered a choice between Rome, at the CNEN central laboratories, or Ispra, at the nuclear research center that Italy had just donated to the newly established European institution for nuclear energy, Euratom. Rome would have been a more difficult location for me, and my mother would never have accepted it. Pietro made me understand that Milan and the prospect of Euratom within the framework of the emerging European Community offered a richer scenario of possibilities than a Roman agency. Looking back sixty years later, I must say that he saw very clearly even then.
Chapter XI: The European Laboratory
Ispra and the Birth of Modern Europe, 1961-1962
Arriving at Ispra was like stepping into the future. Here was a vast nuclear energy research center covering almost every aspect of atomic science, employing 2,000 people from all the countries of the European Community, where French was the primary working language. For a young man of promise from a fascinating but still very provincial city like Ferrara, this was a revelation of what the modern world could become.
Euratom: The Beauty of Beginnings
I was privileged to witness and participate in the actual beginning of Europe through Euratom. This was not the bureaucratic European Union of later decades, but the original dream of European integration through scientific cooperation. The research center buzzed with the excitement of international collaboration, cutting-edge technology, and the sense that we were building something entirely new in human history. Scientists, engineers, and administrators from six different countries worked together with a shared commitment to peaceful atomic energy that transcended national boundaries.
Initially, I occupied the bottom rung of the social and functional hierarchy, partly because I was still with CNEN, which maintained management of the Ispra I research reactor that Italy was to transfer to Euratom only at the end of 1962. The CNEN scholarships operated on a completely different scale from Euratom personnel salaries, so we fifteen CNEN scholarship holders lived quite spartanly compared to the environment surrounding us.
I rented a room in Ispra village, about two kilometers from the center - a distance I had to walk every day. My room had no heating, and the winters in Ispra were cold. But spring and summer were beautiful, and Lake Maggiore at Ispra was still clear and swimmable. We were authorized to use the equipped beach for Euratom personnel and could also use the Euratom Club House, which offered bar and restaurant services along with various entertainment like ping-pong tables and tennis courts.
I played ping-pong reasonably well, a skill that would prove more important than I could have imagined. One evening, when we scholarship holders were engaged in a small ping-pong tournament, I met Selma for the first time - a German woman a few years older than me who cheered me on as a mediocre ping-pong player. We struck up a friendship, and I discovered that Selma was a childcare specialist who worked in the nursery that had just been inaugurated for Euratom personnel.
Chapter XII: First Love
Selma and the Transformation of Vision, 1962-1965
What began as casual friendship with Selma quickly deepened into something more profound. We started spending more time together, and as she put it, our "chemistry" was very compatible. Soon our relationship became closer, and we fell in love with each other. Selma became my first great love, a relationship that would last several years and fundamentally alter my understanding of the world.
Selma from Friedrichshafen
Selma came from Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, bringing with her a perspective on life that was radically different from my own provincial background. She had more resources than I did, including a car, and through her I began to travel in the natural world around us, especially in Switzerland, Austria, and southern Germany. Her approach to nature, to animals, to the relationship between humans and the natural environment, challenged and ultimately transformed the worldview I had inherited from my rural upbringing at Baura.
Through Selma, I encountered parts of the world that I had previously experienced only superficially, and began to see them in entirely new ways. The most significant transformation in my thinking, influenced by Selma, was my vision of the natural world in general and animals in particular. My peasant-derived perspective from Baura - where animals were primarily resources to be managed and exploited - was radically changed by Selma's more empathetic and ecological approach.
Not long after we met, Selma left the apartment that Euratom had provided near the center and rented an apartment in Cerra di Laveno with a magnificent view of Lake Maggiore. For someone who came from the flat expanse of the Padana plain, these were magical landscapes. The entire Varese pre-Alpine region seemed like a different planet - mountains rising directly from lake shores, forests that changed color with the seasons, a complexity and beauty of landscape that my previous experience had never prepared me to appreciate.
The Magic of the Pre-Alps
The Varese pre-Alpine region became my introduction to mountain ecology and landscape beauty. Weekend trips with Selma took us through Switzerland's Rhine valley, Austria's lake regions, and the German Alps. These journeys were not just recreational but educational - I was learning to see natural systems as integrated wholes rather than collections of exploitable resources. The clarity of mountain lakes, the complexity of forest ecosystems, the intricate relationships between geology, climate, and biology all became subjects of fascination rather than mere background scenery.
Living with Selma in the apartment overlooking Lake Maggiore, I experienced for the first time what it meant to create a domestic space based on mutual affection and shared interests rather than family obligation and social necessity. We were building something together - not just a relationship but a way of living that integrated intellectual curiosity, emotional intimacy, and aesthetic appreciation in ways that my dysfunctional family background had never modeled.
The relationship with Selma lasted several years, during which I completed my nuclear engineering training and began my transition into the international scientific community. She introduced me not just to new landscapes but to new ways of thinking about the relationship between human intelligence and natural systems - perspectives that would later influence my approach to biological modeling and ecological research.
Chapter XIII: The University Years
Milan, Marriage, and the Burden of Family, 1964-1983
Around 1964, after my transition from CNEN technical agent to Euratom employee following the direct takeover of the Ispra I reactor, I decided to enroll at the University of Milan, taking advantage of Euratom's openness to university education for its employees. After careful evaluation, Pietro's pragmatism prevailed, and I chose the faculty most feasible for my conditions as a full-time working student, considering attendance requirements and laboratory participation. I chose General Biology, also because Euratom's Biology Division offered me the possibility of an experimental thesis at Ispra in radioecology with Margaret Merlini as supervisor.
Margaret Merlini: International Radioecologist
Margaret was an internationally renowned radioecologist who came from the Savannah River laboratories in the United States and was at Ispra due to marriage - she was the wife of Merlini, the physicist leading solid-state studies at Ispra. Working under her supervision would provide me with cutting-edge experience in applying mathematical modeling to biological systems, particularly in understanding how radioactive materials moved through ecological networks.
The years between 1965 and 1970 were difficult for me, as I found myself still confronting all the problems of a dysfunctional family. My sister entered the path that would lead her years later to suicide, and my mother found herself alone, weighing on her children, having wasted her life with a man of the worst kind - one she had chosen to live with despite his being already married to another woman. This was a black hole that I was never able to clarify with my mother, and it weighed heavily on my entire life.
The Cocquio Crisis
The situation that developed when my mother and sister came to live with me in the house I rented from Euratom in Cocquio, near Ispra, put me into a difficult period of stress. I entered a deep and sudden depressive crisis of a hypochondriacal nature that didn't leave me for years. This practically destroyed my relationship with Selma, and I found myself between 1967 and 1968 in a no-man's land, struggling with both family obligations and personal breakdown.
The effort to emerge from that state was enormous, and I succeeded only through great willpower, taking refuge in study and thanks to some new friendships that around 1969 led me, in a strange way, to my second great love with Luisa. Between Selma and Luisa, I had other superficial relationships that helped me emerge from depression, but they weren't enough. Only with Luisa's arrival did things return to proper order, allowing me to graduate with full marks and find the motivation to continue with a doctorate in Biometry and Medical Statistics.
Luisa: Passion and Bourgeois Stability
Like Selma, Luisa was a few years older than me and belonged to Varese's good bourgeoisie - her family were well-known building contractors. Our relationship was strong and quite passionate in every sense, lasting about three years until 1973 when the Commission granted me a sabbatical year that I spent at the University of Reading in Great Britain. This sabbatical would completely change my life, where I experienced new ways of thinking and conducting research, and where I met Caroline, my first wife, whom I married in 1974 and with whom I returned to Italy.
My degree allowed me to enter the managerial career track at Euratom, which with the merger of the European Community executives became the European Commission, making me a Commission official of managerial rank - a notable change. However, the end of my relationship with Luisa was, as always, caused by the state of my family of origin. My mother was increasingly dependent on me, not only economically (which would have been a minor problem at that point in my career) but especially emotionally and relationally.
My sister, increasingly moving toward chaos, had a daughter with an old lover and managed to get herself fired from the managerial position she had reached at an important cosmetics company in Milan. I settled my mother in a comfortable apartment in the Ispra village and bought an old villa in Gavirate on Lake Varese, where I went to live with my wife.
Chapter XIV: Crisis and Transformation
Stroke, Divorce, and New Love, 1980-1983
For a while, things seemed to stabilize, except for my sister who continued to navigate chaos with another child, this time from her husband. But everything went into crisis around 1980 when my mother, then in her seventies, suffered a major cerebral stroke that left her disabled and became a crushing problem for both family and professional life.
After a long period of rehabilitation, she recovered some autonomy but was unable to live alone. For a while, I tried to manage the situation with caregivers, but it didn't work. This threw me off balance again and put my marriage in crisis. In 1983, it collapsed, and Caroline asked for a divorce, which I granted. We divided our common assets and each went our separate ways. It hadn't been a marriage with truly strong bonds in any sense anyway.
Joan: The Love of My Life
It was during this transition phase that I met Joan, the woman I loved and with whom I would spend the rest of my life. The villa with its mortgage to pay remained with me, and Joan and I decided to marry and go live there with my mother, thus solving my mother's problem for at least a few years. It was a phase of great change, both professionally and personally, with Caroline, who after requesting the divorce, couldn't accept that I had remarried another woman. The world, as Pietro had taught me (and he had left me by then), is difficult to understand.
This period marked the end of one phase of my life and the beginning of another. The boy from Ferrara who had escaped family dysfunction through education and European opportunities had become a man who could no longer escape family responsibilities, even as he built new relationships and advanced in his professional career. The tension between personal autonomy and family obligation - a theme that had defined my entire life - reached a new equilibrium through the partnership with Joan and the acceptance of my role as caregiver to my aging mother.
By 1983, I had completed the transition from promising young scientist to established professional, from bachelor to twice-married man, from son fleeing family dysfunction to adult managing family crisis. The mathematical modeling skills I had developed, the international connections I had built, and the emotional resilience I had cultivated would soon prove essential as my career moved toward the regulatory science work that would define my final professional decades.
The next phase would bring new challenges as European integration deepened and my expertise in statistical modeling found new applications in the emerging world of pharmaceutical regulation...