Dear Readers,
A February assortment of Italian Connections for you: Alberto Sordi, one of my father’s favorite actors, died in February 2003 at age 82. The beloved Roman actor appeared in some 150 films during his fifty-year career. In the early days, he was the Italian voice of Oliver Hardy in the popular Laurel and Hardy films. His career took off when he appeared in two of Fellini’s films in the 1950s.
His 1954 film “Un Americano a Roma”, in which he plays a young man who wants to live the American dream, became a cult classic and led to his Kansas City honorary citizen- ship. A comic actor, he often played satirical versions of middle class Italians, Sordi worked with directors ranging from Fellini to Scola, Zavattini, Monicelli and Comencini. He also directed 15 films himself. He never made the crossover to international stardom, but made two notable appearances in films overseas: “The Best of Enemies” (1961) and “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” (1965).
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Astro Mike, as he is known on Twitter, is actually NASA Astronaut Michael Massimino, PhD, a crewmember of the last two shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Mike, will go down in history as being the first person to Twit- ter from space.
From orbit he wrote: “Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, and enjoying the magnificent views.” Massimino has a Twitter following of more than a million individuals. A third-generation Italian American, Mike is proud of his Italian heritage. In addition to bringing the Galileo telescope into space with him, he also carried the Sicilian flag. Massimino grew up in Franklin Square, N.Y., has an engineering degree from Columbia University, as well as two Master’ Degrees and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.
He also worked at McDonnell Douglas and taught at the university level. He was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 1996 and is a veteran of two space missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope. In his early years, Massimino lived in a house with both his parents and Italian grandparents under the same roof. There, he said, he developed his appreciation for his Italian culture and heritage.
Three of his grandparents were from Palermo and one from Catania. From outer space, he said: “the Island of Sicily looks much, much larger.” After 2009 Hubble mission, Massimino was among five NASA astronauts who greeted Pope Benedict and presented him with a Vatican flag that they had carried into space. “Grazie” to Massimino and his fellow astronauts, the Hubble Space Telescope has been renewed with the capacity to provide fresh insights into the early universe. And thanks to Michael Massimino and the crew, the Hubble will continue to perform its unique service of beaming information to earth, at least for the next four years.
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Albert Ghiorso, a renowned nuclear scientist who co-discovered a dozen chemical elements heavier than uranium, died recently at his home, in Berkeley, California, at age 95.
I met Ghiorso many years ago, through a friend that worked at the university and was delighted to meet the then rare Italo-American that was getting accolades for his scientific pursuits rather than his spaghetti sauce. In a fledgling “radiation lab” on the UC Berkeley campus just before World War II, physicists led by Edwin McMillan and Glenn Seaborg produced the first known chemical elements heavier than uranium – to be known as neptunium and plutonium. Al Ghiorso, a young engineer and inventor who with his colleagues worked in the same lab, soon would discover more of those elements than any other team in the world.
The list bears historic names in the Periodic Table of the Elements: Americium Curium, Berkelium, Californium, Eistenium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, Dubnium and finally Seaborgium. Mr. Ghiorso was born in Vallejo, grew up in Alameda, and as a teenager was already building radio circuits. He graduated from UC Berkeley as an electrical engineer in 1937, and his invention of a commercial Geiger counter quickly attracted Seaborg’s attention at Berkeley.
When the pre-war quest for the atomic bomb began, Seaborg moved to Chicago, and he invited Mr. Ghiorso to join him to work on the Manhattan Project. After the war, they returned to Berkeley lab, where Mr. Ghiorso and his colleagues used a cyclotron to smash atoms together and produce fast-disappearing heavy metals. In 1950s, Mr. Ghiorso led a team that designed and built the radiation laboratory’s heavy ion accelerator, the Hilac. New discoveries demanded increasingly sophisticated experimental machines to create the new elements and complex instruments to detect their fleeting radiation signals.
Mr. Ghiorso led their development. He also conceived combining the Hilac with the radiation lab’s Bevatron to device the Bevalac, an instrument whose high-energy ion beam was long used to treat hundreds of cancer patients. Al Ghiorso was also an ardent bird observer. He invented a special flash for his camera to observe extremely rare and fast-moving birds. He also was a regular operatoer, an art collector, and was active in many programs to interest young people in science.
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Bicycles built for one or that metaphor for romance, bicycles built for two, all require the use of a bicycle pump from time to time. And, as I recently learned from my “marito” all bicycles pumps are not created equal. He purchased an Italian made “Silca Pompe” and has been singing its praises, therefore I thought I would share the info with you in case you or a family member like to bike.
When Felice Sacchi founded Silca in 1917 in a country torn apart by World War I, little did he know that his company would not only still be going strong in the next millennium, but that it would also still be run by his family, in this case his grandson, Claudio Sacchi. Silca is the oldest company in the cycling industry to be continuously run by a single family. But the family ownership is only half of Silca’s storied history. The other half of the story is of continuous innovation to meet the needs of cyclists, who always need air in their tires.
Felice Sacchi responded with pumps that were ever thinner and lighter as tire pressures became higher and bicycles lighter. Felice’s son, Giancarlo, accelerated this legacy of innovation with ideas that we now take for granted in all pumps. Seeing that cyclists wanted to know how much pressure was in their tires, Giancarlo was the first to build a pressure gauge into a pump, on the now-legendary Silca Pista floor Pump. Claudio Sacchi, the third generation, has also delivered a series of innovations to keep Silca products fresh. Take, for example, the extra long Super Pista, the most powerful pump ever made and the first choice among track riders as well as road riders for its high pressure capability.
Mountain bikers love it too, for its high volume. The Super Pista inflates any tire quickly, with a minimum of strokes. Claudio Sacchi also continues to make parts for the old models. As well as many of the old models themselves, always with top- quality parts. This is rare in our throwaway society but is key to Silca’s sterling reputation for durability and serviceability. Silca pumps are serviceable in seconds, they require no tools for disassembly, and the few parts that wear out are easy to replace.
The leather piston cup in the Pista, for example, needs only an occasional dab of grease to keep it lubrificated and pumping, and the rubber seal in the brass head is similarly easy to service. Moreover, replacements parts are available all over the world. It is almost impossible to find a bike shop that does not carry parts for Silca pumps. To find a “Silca Pompe” near you, e-mail: , link: , phone: 0039 0547 329129, Silca Via Balitrona 20/D – 47042 Cesenatico (FC). Communication by fax, now an indispensable tool of modern business was first invented by Giovanni Caselli, in 1858, in the form of a telefax machine. He called his invention a “pan-telegrafo” and made his first transmission in 1858.
Two years later, he transmitted the score of a piece of music by Rossini and in 1865 a Telecopier Service was inaugurated between Paris and Amiens. Covered Areas, now known as “Malls” were inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milano, which opened there over a hundred years ago. It is a Glass-roofed area of street with shops, offices, cafes and restaurants, which have been copied throughout the world, but few have been able to imitate the style of the “Galleria.”
