Remembering Gianni

When I think to my youth, I still consider a real privilege the possibility of spending some time with Gianni. I suspect he was not aware of how much he knew Mathematics and Physics, and how simple it was for him to understand things that are very complicated for most of the human beings, and restate these things in some much simpler form. To me, Gianni was half of an single entity: Franco (Strocchi) and Gianni: Franco&Gianni. I met Franco at SISSA as a doctoral student. When I had to choose a supervisor for my thesis, I had no doubt: no one was as clear as him when teaching. Every topic during my first two years in Trieste were new, and difficult, and I still remember how hard I had to study to reach a reasonable level of knowledge. Well, Franco was the only one I was able to understand from the beginning to the end of his lectures, despite of my poor background. And this is why I asked him to be my supervisor. And Franco introduced me Gianni, his own other half. It was immediately clear that Gianni was a special person, different from many other I had met before. First of all, he was far from being interested in his academic career, a very rare attitude in the Italian panorama. In my eyes, he was mainly (if not only) focused on a sort of personal Holy Trinity: Family, Politics and Science. And career is not Science, as we all know. Sometimes they are connected, sometimes they are not. In Gianni’s case, they were not, since he was not interested in improving his academic position.