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Giovanni Battimelli
is associate professor at the Physics Department of the University "La
Sapienza" in Rome. He has done extensive research on different aspects of
late XIXth and XXth century physics, and on the development of Italian
scientific institutions sin ce 1870. In collaboration with M. Da Maria and G.
Paoloni, ne has edited the writings by E. Amaldi on the history of physics;
recent/y he has co-authored volumes on the history of C.N.R. (Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche) and I.N.F.N. (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare).

Abstract:
Fundings and Failures: The Political Economy of the Fermi Group
Political protection and academic patronage, offered by Corbino and Marconi,
were by themselves not enough to secure the experimental researches on
nuclear physics don e by Fermi and his younger collaborators in the early
thirties; although it was certainly not yet the "big science" of the afterwar
years, and has been depicted by Segrè as "string and sealing wax physics",
stili that kind of work required also adequate funding and financial supporto
The institutions who were supposed to provide that money (mainly the newly
reconstituted Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, where the Physics
Committee was firmly controlled by supporters of the "new physics" and had
Fermi as secretary) were actually unable to do that adequately. Fermi's work

was in fact made possible by means provided through the direct intervention
of the Istituto di Sanità Pubblica, an institution which had in principle nothing
to share with fundamental nuclear research, but was deeply linked, through
its Physics Laboratory, to Corbino and the Physics Institute of via Panisperna.
Tracing the details of that side of the "political economy" of the Fermi group
allows to get a clearer picture of the support given to fundamental physics in
Italy in that period, and of its Iimitations, and ultimately makes it possible to
understand why Fermi's design to create in Italy a national laboratory for
research in fundamental physics, endowed with the best equipment available
in the mid-thirties (a cyclotron) to keep it competitive with the great research
centers abroad, eventually failed.