Chapter XV: Divorce and New Beginnings
The End of One Marriage, The Start of Another, 1983-1984
My divorce from Caroline found me in a passive role - I took no initiatives after our separation and left her Villa Mirasole, the house we had bought together in 1980, while I moved to live in the city of Varese. Caroline, however, did not remain at Villa Mirasole, which therefore remained empty, forcing me to hire a part-time caretaker. Only my dog Ross remained at the villa, cared for by the caretaker I had employed.
It was Caroline who requested the divorce and the division of assets, which all in all was not particularly difficult, partly because we had no children. The divorce procedure proceeded without serious disagreements. I retained Villa Mirasole and my dog Ross, but lost my other two dogs, Ben and Lulù. I also lost the London house and a significant amount of money, but regained my freedom - and my mother to manage, as always in my life.
Villa Mirasole: A New Chapter
Villa Mirasole, perched on the hills overlooking Lake Varese, would become the family home where Joan and I would build our life together. The villa, with its mortgage still to pay, represented both a financial burden and an opportunity - a place where we could create the stable family environment that had eluded me in my previous relationships. The house would witness the birth of our daughters, the care of my aging mother, and the development of my most successful professional period.
I remained living in Varese until the spring of 1984, and already in Varese I was living with my future wife Joan. Once the divorce was concluded, we decided to marry in the summer of 1984 and move to Villa Mirasole, which remained under the burden of the mortgage to be paid.
By autumn 1984, we were settled at Villa Mirasole, and both Joan and I were absorbed in our professional lives. Joan was teaching Latin and Philosophy at the European School of Varese, while I had my first executive appointment with a small research group of about ten collaborators. I was working on applied statistics and computer science in a mix of old-fashioned AI research and applications in the fissile materials control sector.
Chapter XVI: The Foundations of Family
Daughters, Dogs, and Domestic Happiness, 1984-1989
These were productive years and relatively good family life for me, thanks to the fundamental support of my wife Joan. At the end of 1985, we had our first daughter Livia, followed shortly after by Giulia. These were happy years, partly because we had sufficient resources for the help necessary to manage my mother, who had a period of decent health and recovery, also thanks to the presence of her granddaughters.
Joan: The Stabilizing Force
Joan proved to be an irreplaceable help in managing my contradictory character traits. Life flowed relatively peacefully and happily, even though problems and obstacles were never absent, and Pietro's teachings from my childhood proved increasingly valid and meaningful, often conflicting with my immediate impulses. I struggled on many occasions to find the right level of moderation, and I must admit that Joan was invaluable in managing this character flaw of mine - her influence saved me on many occasions.
The education of our daughters weighed mainly on Joan, and I was too often estranged by my professional activities and my way of thinking and distancing myself. I would only realize this much later. For better or worse, we managed to establish a fairly happy way of living, at least for me, until my mother's death in 1997.
During these years, the rhythm of life at Villa Mirasole developed its own patterns. My commute to Ispra, Joan's teaching at the European School, the management of my mother's care, and the raising of two small daughters created a complex but manageable domestic ecosystem. The villa itself, with its gardens and views of Lake Varese, provided a peaceful environment that contrasted sharply with the intensity of my professional responsibilities and the ongoing complexity of family obligations.
Professional Growth and Personal Distance
During this period, I was increasingly absorbed in my work, developing the statistical and computational methods that would later prove crucial in pharmaceutical regulation. However, this professional intensity came at a personal cost. I was often mentally absent from family life, processing complex problems even when physically present at home. Joan's capacity to manage both her own career and the primary responsibility for our daughters' upbringing allowed our family to function, but it also established patterns of emotional distance that I would only later recognize and regret.
Chapter XVII: Tragedy and Resilience
Sister's Suicide and Professional Advancement, 1989-1995
At the end of the 1980s, my sister's chaos reached its conclusion with suicide, bringing us a period of difficulty and turbulence. We had to take on at least partial responsibility for the rest of her family, particularly my niece Greta, who had drug addiction problems. Even on this occasion, Joan played a decisive role in attempting to deal with the situation, considering that we had two small daughters to manage and protect.
The Final Chapter of Family Dysfunction
My sister's suicide represented the tragic endpoint of the family dysfunction that had shaped my entire life. Her death was both shocking and, in a terrible way, predictable - the culmination of decades of self-destructive behavior that no intervention had been able to halt. The responsibility for her daughter Greta, struggling with addiction while we were raising our own young children, created an additional layer of complexity and stress that required all of Joan's diplomatic skills and my own hard-won emotional resilience to manage.
At the beginning of the 1990s, I received my first formal executive appointment as Head of Unit in the Environment Institute of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) General Directorate of the European Commission. The statistical and computer science activities of my group, which was expanded to a Unit, shifted from Fissile Materials Control to regulatory activities for pharmaceuticals.
Supporting European Pharmaceutical Regulation
We became the IT and statistical support unit for the process of forming the future European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicines, which would be established in 1995 with headquarters in London. This was challenging technical work - contributing to the computational infrastructure for a regulatory system that was being developed by many teams across Europe, providing statistical support for evaluating pharmaceutical safety and efficacy, and helping to build part of the technical foundation for what would become a sophisticated drug approval process.
My unit would follow the transition to London in two steps: the first half of my unit moved to London at the beginning of 1995, and the rest followed in 1999. I myself left Ispra for London in 1999, and from 1999 to 2002, the year of my retirement, I commuted between Ispra and London because the family remained at Villa Mirasole.
This period represented an important phase of my professional development. The work we were doing contributed to European pharmaceutical regulation, providing statistical support and computational methods that helped the broader effort to establish regulatory standards across European jurisdictions. The intellectual challenges were significant, and the technical requirements pushed the boundaries of what was possible with 1990s computing technology.
Chapter XVIII: The London Years
Commuting, Complications, and Career Culmination, 1999-2002
The final years in London were again a very difficult period due to complications in the London work environment and the needs of family and the daughters' studies. The weekly commute between Villa Mirasole and London created a strange double life - intense professional engagement in the sophisticated international environment of the European Medicines Agency, followed by returns to domestic responsibilities and the ongoing care of an aging mother.
The Strain of Double Lives
The logistics of maintaining a family in Italy while working in London created constant stress. Joan bore the primary responsibility for managing our daughters' education, my mother's declining health, and the practical demands of Villa Mirasole, while I struggled to maintain performance in a demanding professional environment. The cultural and political complexities of pharmaceutical regulation work, combined with the personal cost of geographic separation from family, created a period of professional engagement shadowed by personal exhaustion.
I prefer to omit the details of the final period of my Commission career, which nonetheless ended well, and I found myself retired at 61 with a solid professional profile and in a position to continue working independently as a consultant. The decision to take early retirement was influenced both by the accumulated stress of the London years and by the recognition that I had made my contribution to European regulatory development.
Looking back on these executive years, from 1983 to 2002, I can see them as a period of meaningful professional contribution built upon considerable personal sacrifice. The statistical work and computational support my teams provided became part of European pharmaceutical regulation. The technical contributions we made played a role in the broader system that survived and evolved after my retirement. But the cost in terms of family relationships and personal well-being was substantial.
The Mathematics of Life Management
During these years, I applied the same systematic thinking that Pietro had taught me to the complex optimization problem of managing a career, a family with young children, and an aging parent with significant care needs. The solution involved constant calculation of trade-offs, careful allocation of limited time and energy resources, and the recognition that perfect optimization was impossible - that success would be measured not by achieving everything but by maintaining the most important systems in acceptable states of function.
By 2002, I had completed the transformation from provincial technical school graduate to European regulatory professional. The boy who had commuted daily from Ferrara to Rovigo, who had found intellectual refuge in Federico's library at Baura, who had learned systematic thinking from Pietro and emotional resilience from family dysfunction, had become someone capable of contributing to institutions larger than any individual career.
The next phase would bring retirement and the opportunity to apply decades of experience in new contexts as an independent consultant...