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ONE Conflict and Inner Turmoil: Childhood during World War II—After the War— High School—Sink or Swim: My University Years My Italian Roots 1 Though I was born in Genoa (on October 6, 1931), I have always considered myself a Milanese, because it is in Milan that I was raised and educated. Today ,having swallowed all its suburbs,Milan is a sprawling,multinational metropolis of five million people, with all the attendant problems of traffic and pollution. It may have gained in wealth and power over the past 50 years, but sadly the price for those gains has been the loss of much of its character. In the 1930s and up to the time I left Italy in 1956, Milan was a smallish city, about the size of Boston proper. It was a commercial and industrial center , busy working and making money, but also a civilized and very livable place. It never had the grace of Renaissance Florence or the fantastic opulence of Rome; what it did have once was an old-fashioned dignity that reflected the spirit and work ethic of its entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. While Rome was the seat of the government and a huge bureaucratic beehive , Milan was the undisputed business capital, the Italian equivalent of NewYork.Not surprisingly,it was also the country’s cultural Mecca.Its opera house, La Scala, attracted the most famous singers in the world; its theaters staged memorable performances, from Shakespeare to Bertolt Brecht and Jean Anouilh. All that, plus museums, concerts, and wonderful bookstores. It also had excellent schools, and whatever culture I was able to bring to the New World I owe, at least in part, to them. Good schools depend on good teachers, and my mother, Elsa Giacconi Canni, was an outstanding teacher. A professor of mathematics, she taught math,geometry,and physics in one of thecity’sbest-known scientific lyceums. During her exceptionally long career, she wrote numerous textbooks that were adopted by the entire school system and for which she received great praise and recognition. My father, a World War I veteran, was a self-made man—an accountant, a carpenter, a trade union leader, a tinkerer, and a thinker. As an outspoken anti-fascist and card-carrying socialist, he always had great difficulty in finding and keeping a position in fascist Italy. During his relatively short life, he worked at many jobs, always with little success. I remember him as a decent, thoughtful, straight-thinking man, one of the few who could see events and their consequences through the fog of propaganda. It was from him that I first heard the famous saying“The emperor has no clothes.”And yet, because of his lack of success,he was considered ineffective and was resented by those members of the family who had learned to conform for the sake of quiet living . Both my aunts were staunch fascists, and my mother, though apolitical, had managed to obtain a card that certified her as one of the earliest members of the party. Her membership was a fiction, but during the war it may have helped all of us. Of the two, there is no question that my mother had by far the greater impact on my life. She was a highly ambitious woman, willful and domineering , and I believe that the bitterness caused by her marital problems led her to place great emphasis not only on her own success but even more on mine. This attitude began fairly early and remained unchanged throughout her life. I was supposed to be special,and whenever I failed to achieve the highest possible marks, she would ask me what was wrong and complain that I had not lived up to her expectations. Over time, her expectations grew to include my winning the Nobel Prize during her lifetime. In the fall of 1937, my parents decided to separate. First because of the breakup of the family and later because of the dislocations caused by the war, I spent much of my childhood being shunted from place to place. It is probably one of the reasons I never developed a true sense of home until my old age. For a long time houses were for me just stops along the way. When my parents separated they enrolled me, at age 6, in the military boarding school San Celso, in Milan. All I remember of that period is that I had to wear a uniform and that I once...

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