Albert Einstein—Italian Memories The Bologna Lectures and Other Events

This book is dedicated to Einstein’s personal and scientific relationships with Italy, which began as early as adolescence and continued over various stages of his life. It collects together a wealth of historical documentation including the letters in which Einstein recalls having lived as a young man with his family in Lombardy, Pavia and Milan; the texts of three lectures delivered by Einstein in Italian in October 1921 in Bologna at the invitation of the mathematician Federigo Enriques, the only lectures he held in Italy; the correspondence with Enriques and other Italian intellectuals, together with the letter that Einstein sent in 1931 to the Minister of Justice Alfredo Rocco to try to avoid the infamy of the oath of allegiance to the fascist regime imposed by Mussolini on university professors. The book closes with some writings on relativity from 1907 to 1914 (Einstein, Abraham, Corbino, Castelnuovo) and the 1920s debate between pro-relativists and anti-relativists publishedin the international journal “Scientia”, founded in 1907 by Enriques.

Introduction.- The Bologna Lectures.- Albert Einstein-Federigo Enriques Correspondence.- Albert Einstein And Other Italian Correspondents.- The "Scientia" Investigation And Other Writings.

Sandra Linguerri is an associate professor of history of science and techniques at the Department of Philosophy and Communication of the University of Bologna. She is the secretary-treasurer of the Italian Society of the History of Science; she is a member of Euromaths, a French-Italian research group in history of mathematics, based at the Institut méditerranéen de recherches avances (IMéRA), Marseille, France. She is a life member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, UK. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Commission for the National Edition of the works of Federigo Enriques. Since 2017, she has been on the Scientific Committee of the journal Physis—Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza. She studies the history of science between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries with particular reference to the history of scientific institutions, to the protagonists of the intellectual landscape, to the institutional, associative, and editorial network of that time in Italy, and gender studies.

Raffaella Simili is an emeritus professor of history of science at the University of Bologna. She studies the history of culture, the scientific institutions in Italy after the unification, and gender perspectives. She is the president emeritus of the Italian Society of the History of Science and a life member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, UK. She was a visiting fellow in England and in the USA.