Welcome to the inauguration ceremony for the new academic year of the Scuola Normale Superiore, on the 214th anniversary of its foundation, 18th October 1810.
First of all I would like to thank the two ladies who will be speaking to you after my own intervention: two scientists of international repute who are contributing greatly in their respective fields of chemistry and mathematics, and who will be speaking to us about their research and about their experience as women in the world of science:
Professor Luisa Torsi of the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, who only two days ago received at a ceremony at the Quirinale the premio Nazionale del Presidente della Repubblica (the National Prize of the President of the Italian Republic), will be giving a talk titled “Il futuro della diagnostica precoce è elettrizzante: la Bioelettronica e la ricerca interdisciplinare” (“The future of early diagnostics is electrifying: Bioelectronics and interdisciplinary research”).
Professor Maria Colombo, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and an alumna of ours, is the winner, this year too, of 2 prestigious recognitions: the Medaglia Stampacchia, awarded by the Unione Matematica Italiana, and one of the 10 prizes awarded every 4 years to mathematicians under 35 by the European Mathematical Society. I recall that in the thirty years' history of these European prizes, 4 out of the 6 winners from Italy studied at the Normale and the University of Pisa. The title of the talk by Maria Colombo is “Dalla passione, un’avventura nella conoscenza” (“From passion, an adventure into knowledge”).
I am nearing the end of my mandate as Director of the Scuola Normale, which lasts until next March. Ever since I became Director, I have always said that I feel it is my main task to preserve our institution as if it were a house that is particularly dear to me, since it enshrines precious values. I still remember the deference with which I crossed this threshold in 1981 as a student. To arrive at the end of my mandate and hand over the keys to my successor and to be able to say that everything is in working order would be the best legacy, albeit a little too ambitious, not only for the rapidly changing scene on the economic and legislative fronts and that of the international relationships under which we live, but also for the high values that the Scuola Normale has always enshrined - merit as a criterion of judgement, research as a tool for growth, the recognition of exchange and dialogue as a fundamental element in our relations with others, and the everyday routine of continuous dialogues on equal terms regardless of the diversity of roles between lecturers, researchers and students. Placing my energy, skills and ambitions at the service of these values, strengthening them, aspiring to consolidate the international prestige of the Scuola Normale, and supporting the spontaneously arising planning ability of the lecturing and research body have been my main concerns; I hope that I have been equal to the task.
I intend to adhere to this commitment until the end of my mandate - a period during which I will be working alongside my successor – with a spirit of sharing, that has prompted my actions even at the most difficult of moments. Seeing that in 2019 the Scuola Normale underwent a far from easy transition, it was in order to render the succession as smooth as possible that I proposed bringing forward the election of the new Director to the end of November. We are undoubtedly spurred by our students to question ourselves every day in our lecture halls, and this is the most demanding challenge of teaching at the Normale. In the last few days we have welcomed - and will be addressing in the next few days - the new undergraduate and PhD students, the latest to pass the admission competition. I urge all of them to live their years here with serenity, but above all the first years, which are without doubt the most challenging and decisive, and not to take on excessive pressures or expectations or to be discouraged at partial failures. They are here because we are deeply convinced that they will succeed in attaining their full potential, as we know from experience.
Going back to my own experience here, first as a student and then as a professor, I realised that talent shows itself in different ways in different people, that we all need our own time and ways to bring ourselves out, not only on account of our character and natural disposition but also because we do not all come from the same social and formative background. It is precisely for this reason that we are working closely with institutions with situations similar to our own, and in particular the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in order to find the right ways of guaranteeing the more disadvantaged students the possibility to develop and to experience life at the Normale, by ensuring their participation in the admission competition.
In these last few years, the Network of Higher Educational Institutions with a special status, a co-ordination in which I have strongly believed since the start of my mandate, has proved to be an essential asset in obtaining various legislative interventions that take our specific nature into account. The last few days have witnessed the funding of 3 national networks led by Scuole Superiori (Higher Education Institutions) with the involvement of the colleges of merit of 11 universities. The aim common to all the networks, in conformity with Mission 4 of the PNRR (NRRP), is the strengthening of the educational and orientation activities covering the entire educational process, from the first years of high school to the PhD. The network of which we are a part, called “MERITA, La Rete per il talento” (“MERITA, the network for talent”), enables us to collaborate with high-level partners, first and foremost the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, its leader, the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori of Padua, the Collegio Superiore dell’Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna and the Scuola Superiore di Studi Avanzati of the Università di Roma Sapienza. I believe that this important project will also be the opportunity for further development of the educational activities at the Fondazione Santa Chiara of San Miniato, a building (structure?) of great historical and architectural value that the Scuola Normale is responsible for enhancing; I take the opportunity to thank the Mayor of San Miniato, Dr. Giglioli, for his constant collaboration.
Again concerning the PNRR (NRRP), another recent piece of news is the overall funding of the TNE project (Iniziative Educative Transnazionali) (Transnational Education initiatives) co-ordinated by the Director of the Biology Laboratory, Tommaso Pizzorusso, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Bari, the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the University of Cagliari and the University of Pisa, led by the Scuola Normale and aimed at the promotion of internationalisation activities with non-EU institutions in the field of neurotechnologies and the neurosciences.
Students will find at the Scuola Normale a source of dialogue, answers and stimulus in the lecturers, researchers and technical-administrative personnel of the Scuola Normale and in the more mature students. As we know from the many interviews with students who had concluded their experience with us some years before, the great privilege of the Normale is precisely its collegial life, which years after remains the most poignant memory of the study years.
At the end of their mandates, I thank the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Stefano Carrai, and that of the Faculty of Sciences, Andrea Ferrara, for their commitment to the Scuola Normale; I wish Corinne Bonnet and Angelo Vistoli, who will be taking up office on 1st November, all the best in their work. In the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Guglielmo Meardi has been re-elected to a second mandate; I thank him too and wish him well.
We must not lose sight of our young recruits after they have completed their study course at the Scuola Normale. Thanks to the Associazione Normalisti, which is due to hold an important “foundational” assembly tomorrow here in Pisa, our community keeps in touch through the years and can now communicate with greater speed and efficiency through the new web portal.
Although we are often rewarded with good places in international rankings, in the most recent World University Ranking we move forward several places world-wide and are confirmed as second in Italy; I have already said on other occasions that these rankings offer us too macroscopic a vision of the universities, often tainted by conflicts of interest in the assessment procedures and with no regard to the considerable diversity among institutional missions. I continue to be convinced, in any case, that the best certification of a university pathway is based on the careers embarked upon by the students, which in part we document in a special section of the web site: prizes and recognitions.
Maria Colombo this year has also received the Premio Feltrinelli Giovani (Feltrinelli Young People's Prize ) from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and 4 out of the 11 of those awarded prizes are our students: also awarded the prize were Lucio Biasiori, a professor at the University of Padua, for the History and Geography sector; Jonathan Salina, director of the Centro di ricerca sulla Filosofia italiana (the Centre for Research into Italian Philosophy) of Florence, who received the prize for the Philosophical Sciences; and Antonino Pittà, a lecturer at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, for Philology and Linguistics.
I also wish to mention Viola Starnone, who was awarded the Premio dell’Accademia Virgiliana di Mantova (the Accademia Virgiliana of Mantua Prize), and Maria Gabriella Matarazzo, an undergraduate and PhD student from 2013 to 2020, winner of the Postdoctoral Fellowship of the prestigious Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Washington.
Our current students are also distinguishing themselves at international competitions, achieving exceptional results, for example, in the Planks events, at which the best students of physics world-wide compete with each other. This year in the Dublin competitions our two teams came second and fifth out of 50 battle-hardened teams from 34 nations - a slight fluctuation compared to last year, when two other teams came in first and second: a solid testimony to the continuous and constant preparation of new generations by the Scuola Normale and the University of Pisa.
The more recently established Faculty of Political and Social Sciences in Florence is year by year gathering fruitful results stemming from its vocation to study such transnational phenomena as conflicts, socio-economic dynamics and new forms of democracy. Our lecturer, Lorenzo Bosi, for example, will be co-ordinating the DEMETRA project, funded by the European Union Horizon programme, with 7 universities taking part; the project is for in-depth study into the relationship between democratic governance and sustainable transition, focussing in particular on the participative and deliberative processes in local food systems, from the perspective of sustainability and ecological transition. Again in Florence, the last year has witnessed the establishment, in its own right as a laboratory of the Scuola Normale, the Centre on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos), directed by Prof. Donatella Della Porta, whose international influence in the field of social movement study has been recognised with the attribution of the prestigious 2024 John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior, the awarding ceremony for which is to be held tomorrow at the University of Notre Dame.
Regarding the latter examples, the Scuola Normale also faces the world and the socio-economic dynamics that govern it, deploying all its resources to provide concrete opportunities first and foremost to scholars, and I am thinking above all of those coming from areas at war or at risk of war and of privation of freedom, to whom we award study grants and lend support in the procedures for their entry into Italy. These activities are not always feasible with ministerial funds; it is with a heavy heart that I recall recent regulations that have seen considerable rises in the costs of health cover for international students – not a good sign for the widely declaimed but not always properly practised principle of internationalisation. On this front however, we have the good fortune to be able to count on the aid of institutions and associations such as the Amici della Scuola Normale Superiore (Friends of the Scuola Normale Superiore), authoritatively presided over by Salvatore Rossi, who has also for several years supported the Concerti della Normale and more recently the activities of the Istituto Ciampi in Florence.
New scientific perspectives are coming to the forefront practically every day, and it is for this reason that our teaching curriculum is this year profiting from further recruitments of lecturers in disciplinary fields that are new to us, such as the History of Religions for the Faculty of Humanities, with the recruitment of Corinne Bonnet, for the Faculty of Sciences, of Giovanni Losurdo, one of the protagonists of the development of the Virgo interferometer for gravitational waves, and of Associate Professor Guilherme Leite Pimentel, a scholar researching into the physics of fundamental interactions and the dawn of the Universe. We are thus able to add to our traditional teaching curriculum in the fields of particle physics, high energy and matter. On this subject, I would also like to mention the contribution of researchers and former students of the Normale to one of the most precise measurements of the W boson mass; the W boson was discovered by our own Nobel prizewinner Carlo Rubbia - a discovery that further confirms the current standard model of the fundamental interactions, a theory to which the students and professors of the Scuola Normale have contributed much, from Fermi onwards.
It was the planned intent of this directorship to open up the Scuola Normale to a wider range of students; we have pursued this intention in many ways, such as with the initiative La Normale a Scuola, a series of online lectures set up during the pandemic, the by now structural initiative Alla Normale anche tu, in which our students introduce the Normale to pupils from schools in many cities around Italy, and the Ispira project, with which, through our women Science students, we reach out specifically to a female audience. The latter initiative is based on our conviction that the traditional orientation, aimed at students of the penultimate year of upper secondary schools, is not sufficient, since interest in scientific subjects needs to be aroused much earlier, as Maria Colombo will also tell us.
An ever closer synergy links our institution to other Italian universities, first and foremost the University of Pisa and the University of Florence, where our students attain their degrees. With a view to a broader opening to the overall student community, we now employ simpler procedures enabling non-internal university students to attend our courses, in a spirit of reciprocal exchange – I think I have used the term symbiosis in almost all of my academic year inaugurations. In the last academic year, more than 300 university students availed themselves of this possibility, which we have now extended, albeit with more marginal numbers, to the other Italian universities.
It will be of fundamental importance to continue to work towards consolidating the international repute of the Scuola Normale, which stipulates dozens of mobility agreements with universities and research centres world-wide, and to take advantage of the possibilities of funding, first and foremost from the EU, in particular for fundamental research, which involves most of the research areas of the Scuola Normale. The European Research Council research calls, initiated in 2007 and by far the most competitive ones, have up to now brought to the Scuola Normale 20 projects, 9 of which are still ongoing - a significant number, considering the dimensions of our teaching body; I shall return to the subject of the ERC further on.
Although intervening in historical buildings is not a simple task, we also wish to render our spaces increasingly more beautiful and functional, with ever greater emphasis on sustainability, starting with our laboratories and research structures, and the colleges. This is not the time and place to describe in detail all the ongoing interventions, involving the Fermi and Carducci colleges and Palazzo della Canonica in this square conceded to us by the Regione Toscana, (the Tuscany Region) which will enable us to free up important spaces now utilised here at the Carovana for the library, the completion of the renovation of the San Silvestro Compendium, which houses the NEST nanotechnology laboratory and laboratories connected to CNR, IIT and S.Anna, and which has recently received sizeable ministerial funding. Also imminent is the inauguration of the new spaces of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences in Palazzo Vegni, shared with the University and Municipality of Florence, which I here thank for their precious collaboration. However, the Palazzo Strozzi site continues to be of central importance for our activities, although the rapid growth of the Faculty in recent years renders this investment of particular strategic importance.
I would like to dwell for a moment on the refurbishment of the rooms of Palazzo dell’Orologio, also in Piazza dei Cavalieri, which houses our Library. The project won first place in the Premio Architettura Toscana (PAT) (the Tuscany Architecture Prize) in the category “works of fitting or interiors”, in that, according to the motivation given for the awarding of the prize, it was capable of combining “functional efficiency with simple, clean and identifiable architectonic interventions”, all the more important for centres such as the Library of the Scuola Normale and the Archives, which have attained sizeable dimensions in terms of materials possessed. Although now many accesses take place online, in particular in the scientific field, the intensity of daily visits has grown considerably, overtaking pre-COVID levels, a demand that has obliged us to extend our opening times to 72 hours per week.
Our faculties collaborate in various ways with their research with the surrounding territory. Examples of these are the Biology Laboratory for neurodegenerative diseases and its collaboration with the *Stella Maris Foundation, the NEST Laboratory in the field of biomedicine and innovative materials, and the analysis carried out periodically by the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, in collaboration with the Region, on the infiltrations of organised crime in Tuscany. Lastly, I recall the many collaborations of the Faculty of Humanities in the management and enhancement of the artistic and cultural heritage, in Tuscany and in Italy.
I recall in this context the focus of our Third Mission project, centred in these last few years around Piazza dei Cavalieri. With the fundamentally important contribution of the Fondazione Pisa, to whom we once again express our thanks, we have a well-established wide-ranging project, scientifically co-ordinated by Professor Lucia Simonato, that provides a web portal with a multitude of art history sheets on the buildings of the Square and that for the first time makes it possible for citizens and tourists to book visits to the Palazzi accompanied by our art history students. I thank all the organisations whose buildings look onto the Square, the University of Pisa, the Istituzione dei Cavalieri di Santo Stefano (the Institution of the Knights of Saint Stephen), the Parish of San Sisto and the State Property Office (Demanio) for their collaboration. Also of importance is the agreement with the State authorities (the Soprintendenza) of Pisa and Livorno for the enhancement of the Chiesa di Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri (the Church of the Knights of Saint Stephen), in which a construction site has been set up for a survey of the conditions of the roof and the wood coffered ceiling, and which reopened in September with tours by the students of the Scuola Normale, co-ordinated by Professor Simonato, to whom we are extremely grateful for her generous commitment.
Another objective correlated to our project was to put “our” square in touch with the most important in Pisa, Piazza dei Miracoli. Our Professor Giulia Ammannati collaborated with Opera della Primaziale Pisana in the exhibition “La Torre allo Specchio”, (“The Tower in the Mirror”) on the occasion of the 850th anniversary of the Leaning Tower. The collaboration with Opera Primaziale, which in 2026 will concentrate on the “Pulpito di Giovanni Pisano” (“The Pulpit of Giovanni Pisano”), in view of the centenary of the recomposition of this work, has contributed this year to the creation of the exhibition titled "La Torre della Fame" (“The Tower of Famine”), focussing on the tower of Count Ugolino, now incorporated into Palazzo della Gherardesca, where a part of our Library is sited. A mere few months after its opening, the exhibition has become an important stopping place for tourists on their way to and from Piazza dei Miracoli, with hundreds of visits daily. Our exhibition connects the two squares named in honour of Dante, to whom the fame of Ugolino is due and whose portrait has been identified in the frescoes of Buffalmacco in the Camposanto monumentale by Giulia Ammannati, whom we thank for the important work that she has carried out in these numerous projects.
I have the privilege of inaugurating the academic year, and hence of giving a public speech, a few days after the ministerial decree that parcels out the funds for the ordinary functioning of the universities and the higher educational institutions with a special status. Although we rectors have the responsibility to make the best use of the funds that we are assigned for the missions of our institutions, we have just as great a responsibility to inform public opinion of university underfunding. It is true that the PNRR (NRRP) has contributed considerable resources, but let us not forget that these resources, save for the infrastructures, are needed for education and not for investing in human capital. The ministerial round table that I co-ordinated in 2022 was created in awareness of the necessity for gradual interventions to enhance this investment, also bearing in mind that within the next 3 years, around 10% of full and associate professors will have retired.
We are currently seeing a significant reduction in the ordinary functioning funds due to a different organisation of the items that make up the funds and to the failure to obtain salary increases (a process that is automatic for other sectors of public administration). The first effect of this reduction will be to create uncertainty as to recruitment, further exacerbated by a chronic instability of the rules of the game, and to slow down the turnover. I believe that our university system and our young people deserve better; as an example, I wished to draw your attention to the performance of the Italian researchers in the assigning of the European Research Council Starting Grants, the most competitive and selective research calls of all.
This is my last academic year inauguration and I would like to take the opportunity to extend some thanks: outside the Scuola Normale, to all the institutions of the territory - the Prefecture, the Region, the Municipality, the Police headquarters (the Questura) and the State authorities (the Soprintendenza), for their ever-present attention to our needs; within the Scuola Normale, to Mario Piazza and Alessandro Schiesaro, the two Deputy Directors who have been at my side, the General Secretaries, Aldo Tommasin and Enrico Periti, the Deans, the Prorectors, the Delegates, the teachers, researchers, the technical-administrative staff who have succeeded each other and those with whom I will be working until the end of my mandate, and the Academic Senates.
Together we have made difficult decisions, always seeking to maintain unity among all the components of the Scuola Normale: I am thinking of the years of the pandemic, the exit from the Federation, and the document of March on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In relation to the latter, several months on, now that the topic is being discussed at various round tables, including those of the CRUI and the University Ministry, all of us can assess the opportuneness of our warning about dual use, in the context of the EU legislation, which goes back to 2021, and of international law.
As I draw to my conclusion, I wish to mention the Concerti della Normale season, which this year has reached its 58th edition; the last season saw over seven thousand attendances, a testimony to the great popularity of the programmes, thanks to the artistic choices of Maestro Carlo Boccadoro. You are all invited to this evening's inaugural concert of the season, with the violinist llya Gringolts and the pianist Peter Laul. You are also invited, at the end of this ceremony, to visit our new exhibition of contemporary art at the Scuola Normale, curated by the Centro Pecci di Prato (the Pecci Centre of Prato), another initiative funded by the Associazione Amici; I would like to greet the Director of the Centre, who is here with us today.
I would like to end by quoting the words with which in 1862, over 160 years ago, the Minister of State Education, Carlo Matteucci, illustrated to the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy the reform bill of the Scuola Normale. The students, he said, would find at the Scuola Normale “in their lives, in their studies, in shared activities and in the amicable relations with professors of universally acclaimed renown, their blueprint for life and work”, with the hope that this institution might serve to “reawaken in young people, as is required in true education, the sentiment of dignity and responsibility for their own acts.”
This is my hope and aspiration for the Scuola Normale of today and tomorrow and with which I inaugurate the academic year 2024-2025, the 214th since its foundation.
Luigi Ambrosio
Director Scuola Normale Superiore
Pisa, 18/10/2024