If places have a memory, the workshops in via Panisperna will remember those kids who changed history. If these walls could speak, as they sometimes say, in a breath, with a display of melancholy, probably would tell of a group of young physicists who at the headquarters of the Royal Institute of Physics in via Panisperna, in the middle of the Monti district (one of those few pieces of Rome that in certain glimpses still appear virgin and somehow ancient), between 1928 and 1937, they worked and studied and lived, between discipline and fun.
Their names are Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Ettore Majorana, Bruno Pontecorvo, as well as obviously Enrico Fermi, who led the group and who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1938, by which time the institute had already moved to the university city and each of them had gone their own way, the group split like the uranium nuclei bombarding with neutrons , scattered by the promulgation of racial laws. It was them, in October 1934, to discover nuclear fission, paving the way, because this often happens, that science ends up in the wrong hands and becomes a weapon, for the invention of the atomic bomb.
History remembers them as the boys of via Panisperna, which is a strange, to hear it now, and romantic way of designating a group of eminent, albeit young, physicists. It makes them look like characters from a children's novel, or members of a 50s neighborhood band, but it's a nice way to remember them.
Another way of remembering them is what was announced on Friday when, in the presence of President Giorgio Napolitano and Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri, thehe inauguration ceremony of the works that over the next two years will transform that space, currently an offshoot of the interior ministry, into a museum, the Historical Museum of Physics and the Fermi Study and Research Center, returning science to those rooms and the voice to its walls, which will thus return, talking about the experiments of the boys of via Panisperna, as it should be.
