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Science in Italy
| Article
# : |
11544 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
4,766 Words |
| Author
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Fabrizio Del Piero
Fabrizio del Piero is an Italian journalist specializing in
international affairs who has worked in the United States for
several years as a Washington correspondent for ANSA, the
Italian news agency. He is presently regional information
officer (Europe) at the FAO in Rome. |
In America and elsewhere, the image of modern Italy is promptly associated with many areas of excellence such as fashion design and Ferrari sports cars. Science and technology do not immediately come to mind. By all rights they should.
Italian scientists are often in the limelight for their achievements and for winning international recognition, Nobel Prize included. The most recent Italian to win one was physicist Carlo Rubbia in 1984.
Italian high-tech products are successfully competing and gaining ground in United States and world markets. In Washington, D.C., Metro passengers travel on high-performance automated subway trains supplied by Italy's Breda. The Pentagon chose the 9mm-caliber Beretta, an example of Italian technical excellence, to replace the legendary Colt .45 as the standard U.S. military side arm. The U.S. Navy is purchasing advanced amagnetic engines developed by Isotta Fraschini to power a new generation of anti-mine ships.
All this should come as no surprise. These are not isolated instances or freak successes. In the case of Italy, this is a vigorous reassertion of a tradition going back to the very dawn of modern science and technology.
Leonardo da Vinci, the fifteenth-century scientist-engineer-architect-sculptor-painter, still epitomizes the multi-faced creativity of the Italian Renaissance. Galileo, the seventeenth-century astronomer-physicist-mathematician, established modern scientific thought and methods. In the centuries since then, all the way to the present time, Italians have left their mark on the advancement of virtually every branch of the sciences.
Many of these contributions are honored by scientific terms which few people today perceive as having an Italian connection. How many would score well on a quiz about the origin of the electrical measure volt? The term was coined in honor of Alessandro Volta, who developed the first electric battery in the late 1700s. The process of galvanization was so named after another pioneer of electrology, Luigi Galvani. In medicine, the Fallopian tubes derives their name from Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio. In music, the invention of the piano was a result of technologic innovation by Bartolomeo Cristofori, who called his new instrument the "pianoforte", meaning soft-loud, after its most distinctive technical feature. More recently, the term marconigram (now "telegram") was an enthusiastic world's tribute to the inventor of wireless telecommunication,
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