Enrico Fermi was extraordinary. He was the first internationally known Italian physicist since Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvari more than a century earlier. Fermi was one of the great theoretical physicists and perhaps the greatest experimental physicist of the twentieth century.

I spent two half-years in Rome with Fermi; the spring semester of 1931 and the spring of 1932. Meeting the great man was a shock. This was no “highbrow” in an ivory tower. Coming into his office, you found a man who looked like other Italians on the street—but busily doing some algebra on quantum electrodynamics. The door would be open, and one or more of his colleagues would drop in whenever they felt like it. This informality was a great change from the structure of the German universities to which I was accustomed.

The most important of Fermi’s colleagues were Emilio Segrè, Franco Rasetti, and Edoardo Amaldi. There...

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