«Rita Levi-Montalcini lived a hundred-year life during which she had to overcome, one by one, many obstacles keeping her from fully realising her personal project» What would they have thought if she had suggested a scientific research career? Her parents did not oppose her medicine studies directly, but they considered it an improper occupation for a woman. Levi-Montalcini had to work as a baker to pay for her medicine degree, which she studied between 19, during a difficult period for a middle-class Jewish family in fascist Italy. Her father was an engineer and her mother an painter. She was born in Turin, the youngest child to a Sephardi Jewish family. Many would have given up along the way, but the Italian neurologist reacted to obstacles with the force of rebellion. Levi-Montalcini lived a hundred-year life during which she had to overcome, one by one, many obstacles keeping her from fully realising her personal project. Considering that Italian Jews lost their rights as citizens.Rita Levi-Montalcini’s life can be summarised in a single sentence: more than one century of struggle. The wounds that Rita and her father inflicted on each other still festered at his death.Īccording to her autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection, her ancestors were Sephardic on both sides and traced their Italian roots back to the Roman Empire. In his turn, he played only with Paola, creating a division between the twins in which Rita told Paola everything, and Paola told Rita nothing. Nor was he taken in by her excuse that his mustache prickled. She would turn her face away when he bent to kiss her. ![]() Here is the Rita of eighty years ago, who avoided physical contact with adults, especially her father. There is no hint of a smile on her full mouth, her eyes are not joyful. The other picture is a copy of a black-and-white photograph of a small, seated child, her delicately-embroidered white dress contrasting with the dark hair curling around a face also supported by the right hand. and As They Are." One picture shows the Rita of five years ago, her right hand supporting her face, her mouth slightly widened by the hint of a smile. I am looking at two pictures, juxtaposed, that appeared in "F," the Saturday magazine supplement of the Corriere della Sera, dated February 9, 1991, in a feature on famous Italian women, "As They Were. In 1986, she and her American colleague, Stan Cohen, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology for the discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF). Her eyes are greenish-gray, a light color unexpectedly frequent in dark-haired Italians. Her thick, gray hair is styled smartly and simply, and so are her clothes. The wrinkles on her face she attributes to inordinate sunning at a much younger age. Her carriage is erect, she is enviably slim, her hands don't tremble, she doesn't wear glasses. ![]() Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in 1909, and has just turned 90. The answer has to do with the singular nature of Italian culture and Jewish assimilation to this culture, as well as to the variable relationships between women and men in both Italy and the United States. ![]() It took me a long time to find the answer to my question, a time I spent reading quantities of books and papers, interviewing her colleagues, friends and relatives, going back and forth between the United States and Italy. She only smiled a little as she went to the book-shelves in the hall, and returned with an armful of books that she placed next to the watering-can. She put the watering-can on a table beside the black corduroy couch on which I was sitting. "HOW COULD YOU GO BACK TO A COUNTRY THAT persecuted you, that took away your citizenship, your profession, where you had to live underground to survive?" She was watering her plants, dozens of coral and crimson plants, in the living-room of the apartment she shares with her sister Paola.
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