Margherita Hack and Marco Morelli
Ed. Einaudi
pp. 180

Margherita Hack ... a name that brings me back to when, still a young boy, I watched Piero Angela's documentaries on TV.

I do not remember exactly but I'm sure it was in those years, late seventies or early eighties, that I saw for the first time that woman with a strong Tuscan accent and immediately I was fascinated by the way he told the universe that surrounded us.

E 'since then I remained the passion for astronomy.

Some time ago I learned of his death and I realized that time passes for everyone and even those that one considers fixed points in one's life, sooner or later disappear.
So when a few months ago, during one of the usual but always pleasant visits to the bookshop, I came across Margherita's book without thinking too much about it. Margherita would have continued to accompany me, as do the stars fixed in the sky, from the library of the house.
The book is written in four hands, with Marco Morelli, director of the planetary science museum in Prato.
The two authors are in Trieste and sitting on a bench facing the sea, waiting for a guest who will never arrive, they dive into the memories of Margherita's life.
It is the story of a life made of successes and disappointments, of love for science and displeasure for the situation in Italy.
Margherita and Marco, with the help of Aldo, Margherita's husband, retrace the life of many small episodes with lightness, highlighting the things in which daisy has always believed. The book is not a true biography, if anything it is a book of memories, seasoned by the piquant lines of a woman who, besides being the greatest Italian astrophysicist, was also a woman with no hair on her tongue.
I like to remember only one episode of the book, when Morelli talks about the types of university students, "there are five students with a capital S, students, studenticchi, paraculo and quaquaraqua ..."
At the end of the discussion Margherita asks finally what is meant by quaquaraqua, "I quaquaraqua are those who speak, speak, speak and do nothing! [..] They get angry in their meanness, the ambition of wanting to be someone and the intimate awareness of being nobody. "
And daisy blurted out: "But these are our politicians! Other than the students ..."

A truly beautiful, pungent, touching book, to be read in one go and kept in your library forever.

Great Margherita Hack and thanks also to Marco Morelli!

Alessandro Rugolo