Berbardo Dessau. Physicist, scientist and teacher.
With Alessio Stollo
Writing Creation and Direction: Paola Tortora VintuleraTeatro
Main Testimonies and Documentary Sources: Umberto Steindler, Franca Focacci, Gabriella Steindler Moscati
Born in Germany, Dessau graduated in Physics in Strasbourg in 1886 with a thesis on the new technique of deposition of metal films by cathodic pulverization (sputtering). After completing his studies he came to live in Italy and was for fifteen years an assistant and collaborator of Augusto Righi, and witness of his meetings with the young Marconi, at the Universities of Padua and Bologna.
In 1904 he won the chair of Experimental Physics at the Faculty of Medicine of Perugia. Although he became an Italian citizen, during the First World War he was discriminated against and suspended from service. He suffered the disgrace of the racial laws of 1938 and managed to escape deportation only thanks to the doctor and colleague Fedele Fedeli, who hid him in his clinic. He was also expelled from the Italian Physics Society, of which he had been one of the first members, between the late ‘800 and early ‘900. On his tombstone, he wrote: “Physicist, Scientist, Teacher”.
This recited breviary is the story of some of the most significant moments of his life, marked by peaks of success repeatedly wounded by events, personal and historical, and dramatic.