The project, conceived within the renewed historical building of the Enrico Fermi Historical Physics Museum and Research Center (CREF), aims to retrace the history of the Royal Physics Institute during the period it was located on Via Panisperna. The goal is to preserve and share the memory of its key figures and the research conducted there at a time when Italian physics was a leader on the international stage.

Continuing the work started with the scientific biography of the founder and first director of the Royal Physics Institute, Pietro Blaserna (1836-1918), we have deepened our understanding of his successor, the physicist Orso Mario Corbino (1876-1937) and his work. We are paying special attention to particularly significant events related to Corbino’s directorship, both institutionally and organizationally, with specific reference to his relationship with Enrico Fermi and his group of collaborators. We are also exploring his work in communicating and popularizing scientific culture, especially physics.

Furthermore, we are investigating the institutional and research policy relationships between Orso Mario Corbino and Guglielmo Marconi. This includes their impact on supporting and funding the research carried out by Fermi’s group, as well as broader issues of research policy in the first three decades of the 20th century. These relationships led, among other things, to the founding of the CNR’s Institute of Electroacoustics at the Via Panisperna site, with Corbino as director and Marconi, then president of the CNR, as a supporter of the project.

Additionally, in the context of gender studies, we are researching and highlighting the work and figures of several women scientists who worked at the Royal Physics Institute during this period. These include Matilde Marchesini, Margarethe Traube, Evangelina Bottero, Carolina Magistrelli, Nella Mortara, and even Laura Capon and Ginestra Giovene.

We are also examining Enrico Fermi’s collaborations with women scientists during his time in America (1939-1954). The names we’re focusing on include Joan Hinton, who collaborated with Fermi on the Manhattan Project; Leona Woods, at the University of Chicago and other laboratories; and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, a 1963 Nobel laureate, with whom he shared fruitful research and exchanges of ideas.

Finally, 2025 marks the 160th anniversary of the birth of Arturo Malignani, who was born in Udine in 1865, and the 130th anniversary of the patent he filed to solve the problem of evacuating the bulbs of electric lightbulbs. Malignani was a brilliant inventor, a self-taught, curious scholar who played an important role in the development of the incandescent lightbulb at a significant moment in Italian history regarding the birth of technology and the spread of electric current usage. Thanks to the discovery of new archival materials, we intend to revisit and expand on this topic. It is also linked to the interests of the Royal Physics Institute on Via Panisperna during Blaserna’s directorship and his collaboration with Guglielmo Mengarini, the designer of the electrical energy transmission system that transported power from the Tivoli power plant to Rome.