Word: rome
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...born in Florence, the son of intensely Europhile parents (his father was a New England doctor, his mother a clinging neurasthenic who couldn't bear the crude culture of her birthplace). The Sargents were not rich, but they moved from one roost to another--Rome, Paris, Nice, Munich, Venice, the Austrian Tyrol--for the first 18 years of their son's life. All he retained of America was his passport and some traces of accent; yet he held onto both until his death. Sargent's relation to America was neither resentful nor yearning, as it is with so many expatriates...
...burgeoning science supported such transforming applications as medical imaging, nuclear reactors, atom and hydrogen bombs, radio and television, transistors, computers and lasers. Physical knowledge increased so rapidly after 1900 that theory and experiment soon divided into separate specialties. Enrico Fermi, a supremely self-assured Italian American born in Rome in 1901, was the last great physicist to bridge the gap. His theory of beta decay introduced the last of the four basic forces known in nature (gravity, electromagnetism and, operating within the nucleus of the atom, the strong force and Fermi's "weak force"). He also co-invented and designed...
...left bereft by the death of his cherished older brother Giulio during minor throat surgery. Einstein characterized his own commitment to science as a flight from the I and the we to the it. Physics may have offered Enrico more consolatory certitudes than religion. Browsing through the bookstalls in Rome's Campo dei Fiori, the grieving boy found two antique volumes of elementary physics, carried them home and read them through, sometimes correcting the mathematics. Later, he told his older sister Maria that he had not even noticed they were written in Latin...
...have repelled him. "Not a philosopher," the American theorist J. Robert Oppenheimer later sketched him. "Passion for clarity. He was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active." He won appointment as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome at 25 and quickly assembled a small group of first-class young talents for his self-appointed task of reviving Italian physics. Judging him infallible, they nicknamed him "the Pope...
...Italian educator Maria Montessori establishes her first preschool, in Rome...