📍Via Gaeta 19, 00185 Rome, Italy
1901 – 1908“I was born in September 1901 in a building on Via Gaeta, near Termini station in Rome, where my father, Alberto, worked as an administrator for the state railways. My mother, Ida, was a schoolteacher, and I was the youngest of three children. As a baby I was sent to a wet nurse in the countryside, as was common then, and came back to Via Gaeta when I was about two and a half. In 1908 we moved to an apartment on Via Principe Umberto, so cold in winter that I studied sitting on my hands and turning the pages with my tongue. My closest companion was my brother Giulio, a year older than me. Together we built electric motors and toy aeroplanes, and talked endlessly about how things worked. When I was fourteen, he died after a minor operation on his throat, and our home was full of grief. I threw myself into books. At the Campo de' Fiori market I found a two-volume treatise on physics, written in Latin in 1840, and I read it from cover to cover. A colleague of my father, the engineer Adolfo Amidei, saw how quick I was and lent me books on geometry, algebra and mechanics. He advised me to go to the elite Scuola Normale in Pisa. I went on to become one of the great physicists of the century, winning the Nobel Prize in 1938 and building the first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942. A plaque on Via Gaeta now marks the building where I was born.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today