1 Focused on Focusing and Other Mysterious Stories Pier Giorgio Righetti Prof. Emeritus, Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta”, Politecnico di Milano, 20131 Milano, Italy. E-mail: [email protected] Figure 1. Wanted? Not any more, I suspect! FAMILY AFFAIRS I was born in April 1941, in the second year of World War II, almost one year after that disgraceful tenth of June 1940, when Mussolini, from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia in Rome, entered the war as an ally of Hitler, paving the way to total disaster for the entire Italian population. The first one occurred already in November of the same year when this genius of war, second only to Napoleon or Julius Caesar (so he thought!) declared war to 2 Greece claiming that we would have broken the back bones to this population in no time at all. In fact, after barely a week, at the border between Albany and Greece, in a desolate village called Perati, the Greek army broke Mussolini’s back and cut to pieces the most glorious and well-trained Division Julia, the glory of the alpine troops. His second ”Beau Geste” was the invasion and total dismembering of Yugoslavia, which started on 8th of April 1941 and was over in a few days. In fact, he was no winner in this miserable and treacherous affair: It was Hitler who, after signing a peace treaty with the Yugoslavian newly-appointed government, on a vile surprise air attack destroyed completely Beograd and took over the nation. Mussolini simply moved in and claimed part of the spoils, annexing Croatia and few extra territories. Two weeks after this Mussolini’s superb exploit I was born in Forlì, close to the Adriatic Sea shore. Things began to rapidly deteriorate. Towards the end of 1941, Mussolini joined again Hitler’s army in the invasion of Russia and sent one hundred thousand of our best-trained alpine troops to fight on the steppes of the river Don (there were no mountains there, why sending mountain troops?). These soldiers were poorly equipped and had no proper clothing: in the winter of 1942, in the icy steppes reaching -30 to -50°C, most of them died as frozen statues planted in the snow. Less than 10% managed to return home. Curiously, even in such hard war days, my parents kept generating children (not the midnight children as per the famous novel by Salman Rushdie, born to be free in the evening of India’s independence) bound for war misery. Seven of us were born in rapid succession. Years after, when thinking of it, it did not look like a wise choice, so why did they do it? For one reason, Mussolini had been encouraging large families, giving prizes to the larger ones. As an additional reason, both my parents were strictly educated in the catholic religion, which preached sex only for the purpose of generating new life, pure sex for sex being a mortal sin. One has to add to it that, in those war days, there were no newspapers worth reading (all the press being thoroughly controlled by the regime), no radio worth listening to (again, due to tight regime control) and, of course, no TV. As odd as it looks, my mother had a miscarriage at the first pregnancy, and she lost the child, called Nazareno. Would you believe it? Although she had to take care of another seven children (and she did it heroically) she still kept complaining the loss of poor Nazareno. Why should it be so? I guess that, due her strict religious upbringing, she was mourning the loss of Jesus Christ (in Italy nicknamed Nazareno, he who was born in Nazareth). Things kept getting worse, of course, as war progressed. Towards the end of 1943, as the US army, that has crossed over from Sicily into Calabria, began the move northbound 3 while weeding away the Nazi’s army from the South of the Stivale (Italy is shaped as a boot), the entire nation began to disintegrate. As they reached the Gothic defense line (similar to the Maginot line in France), the Italian army began to melt away. Our family moved from Forlì running away in front of the front of the US army (my father was an officer in Mussolini’s army). We ultimately landed in the suburbs of Vigevano and got a lodging in wooden barracks, no heating, no running water (except from the roof when it was raining). We simply did no have enough food and my early memories were the constant fights with my brothers for breadcrumbs at the end of our poor meals, even scraping them from the floor. A FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH FOOD CHEMISTRY When I was six years old, my father got a job as a schoolteacher in a rural village, where we moved to live in. We had lodging in a medieval farm, which in those days was built like a four-sided stronghold, surrounded by a large plaza where, at the end of a work day, all carriages, horses, animals and agricultural machines would be stored and the entrance gates closed at night. It might sound strange to still keep these medieval customs in modern times, but it should be remembered that Italy had a disastrous outcome in World War II, since we not only lost the war but we were criminals too as we had sided with the Nazis. The entire nation was poverty stricken and plenty of criminals and desperados were on the loose to rob anything they could get their hands on. At least we had a handkerchief of land to till, so my mother kept a small garden to grow vegetables, tomatoes, cabbages, salads, pumpkins and the like, enough to get some extra food for survival. There I had my first (traumatic) experience with food chemistry. Come October and November, the farmers used to sacrifice the biggest pigs, so as to produce salami and prosciuttos and fat for the coming cold winter. So, one day I saw a gallows (not like those erected in US courthouses in eighteen hundred, such as the one you can see in the courthouse of Tombstone, AZ, for hanging bandits) rising in the middle of the courtyard. Late in the afternoon, the farmers brought in a pig, the largest animal I had ever seen, and started hanging it up, not by the neck, like criminals, but by the hind legs. The animal was so large and fatty that they had to use pulleys to lift it up. Knowing what was coming, my mother had locked us inside the house and closed the window shades, so that we would not witness the slaughter to come. As the pig was hanging head down, the poor animal started screaming in a frightening manner, the tremendous sound bouncing along the walls of the 4 quadrilateral, thus being amplified. Somehow I managed to peep through a hole in the window shades and what I saw got printed in my retina for years afterward. A farmer approached the pig with a sharp knife and slashed its jugular vein, with blood spurting down copiously and filling a large basin held in situ by a circle of other farmers. A horrifying view for the young chap I was. Yet, come winter, we appreciated a lot the outcome. The collected blood, after clotting, had been boiled with aromatic herbs and garlic and made into sausages, called “sanguinacci” (blood sausages). Well, they were nutritious and tasty and were a blessing to survive the harsh winter. I had to witness, unfortunately, more slaughter, albeit on a smaller scale. Occasionally, as they grew up, my mother would sacrifice a chicken from our small chicken coop. She knew very well how to do it, since she grew up in a farm: wring the neck of the poor animal with a sharp stroke, plunge it for a couple of minutes in boiling water, and pluck all feathers out (a facile operation thanks to the hot water bath). I had to assist her and that did not make me happy at all. Yet, when I think that today this is done on a giant scale, killing millions of those animals, grown in miserable conditions in overcrowded cages, I think we were somewhat more merciful, since at least our chicken grew happily while pasturing freely in the fields. THE FIRST WHIFF OF VOLATILE CHEMICALS At the age of eight we finally moved to the town of Vigevano (35 Km south of Milano), a metropolis for us (albeit not so dreadful as the Metropolis by Fritz Lang). We were living in a house in whose courtyard stood the stables and carriages for the horses of a small firm delivering goods, parcels and furniture around town. In those days, it was cheaper to do that by horse-drawn carts than by trucks, due to the general poverty of the nation. Needless to say, swarms of flies kept colonizing our kitchen. There was this most powerful insecticide, whose acronym was DDT (1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl) ethane), but that we had nicknamed “flit”. It was its onomatopoeic attribute, due to the fact that, for spraying it, we used a kind of a bicycle pump with a small reservoir containing the poison. At each stroke, a cloud of fine mist would issue exhaling this “flit” sound. We kids were instructed to go into the kitchen, close the window and spray it generously around while avoiding breathing it and closing our eyes. I guess we did it, but I still remember the acrid smell of DDT and I suspect we inhaled it no matter what.