Barbara Bellomo
Ed. Garzanti, Milan 2024
pagg.248
“Even if this is not a book about Majorana, there is in it the desire to remember the great Sicilian genius and the group of via Panisperna”. Thus the author, a historian and teacher at a high school in Catania, introduces us to this novel of hers where the protagonist is Ida Clementi, a fictional character who, for a period, was the librarian of the physics institute in via Panisperna, when a group of young physicists consisting of Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo and Ettore Majorana met there, a group that introduced atomic energy to the world.
This is a historical novel, where the mystery of the disappearance of Ettore Majorana, from Catania like the author and like Ida, accompanies the reader, in a gripping plot, until the end of the book. However, it is certainly not Bellomo's aim to resolve, in these pages, the cold case relating to the famous physicist from Catania.
The friendship between him and Ida - who met when they both lived in Catania and met again in Via Panisperna - however, forms the backdrop to the novel where the vicissitudes of Ida, who lived between Catania, Rome and Turin, from the end of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1950s, are described, with continuous passages between past and present, vicissitudes that intertwine with those of the boys of Via Panisperna.
Ida, having obtained the job in the library thanks to the acquaintance between her father, a lawyer, and Orso Mario Corbino, a physicist, senator of the Kingdom and director of the Royal Institute of Physics based, in the 90s, in Rome, in via Panisperna XNUMX, was forced to abandon it to follow, in Turin, Raffaele, her husband, a surgeon. It is also true, however, that her father “he is convinced that a girl at eighteen should think about starting a family, not about leaving home”. Therefore, even though he was the vehicle to get that job, he never accepted the fact that his daughter went to work, considering, therefore, that gesture as a sort of rebellion. Thanks to that job, however, Ida will meet her true love, Alberto, never forgotten. But he will not be the man she will marry. Her father will impose another man on her: Raffaele, the surgeon. “Raffaele had been the only way she had found to escape her father's oppressive and unbearable control, in the darkest period of her life”. An unhappy marriage, therefore, which will lead her to a pause for reflection and a return to Sicily, where her mother and brother still lived. During that trip, however, Ida feels the need to stop in Rome, and pass through Via Panisperna. “He doesn’t know exactly why he’s there. Maybe because when life disappoints us we need to remember who we were and look for the golden clouds of our past.” And there, in his city, the memories of his conversations with Majorana become more vivid. “Reading planted the seed of dissent in me, even if my mother thinks it depends only on my nature”, he once told her. “Hector smiles at her and says softly: Don’t worry about being different. Diversity makes you special.”
Catania, however, is also the memory of an extremely painful secret that she carries inside. After all “Life would be too easy if you always knew the consequences of your actions, if you could face the trials of youth with the maturity of years. You make mistakes and you pay. You can come to terms with your soul, but guilt always finds a way to rise again and take away your peace.” And, at the end of her journey in search of her past, Ida realizes that “in his life that was perhaps his real mistake. Never having spoken enough.”
Gianlorenzo Capano