Thoughts of Gianni

I met Gianni precisely on 18 September 1983 in Leipzig during a conference. After his evening lecture on “Local States in QED and Gauss Law” we had a short talk about the subject. We agreed next day to skip lunch and go for a short excursion with my car to the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. He showed up together with his future wife Antonella. That was yet six years prior the fall of the Berlin Wall and I did not have a passport for the West. But we were young and we somehow believed in the future. For the time being we exchanged ideas by postal mail. In 1991 I received an invitation to the department of physics in Pisa. When the train stopped at Pisa Centrale (Pisa’s main rail station) Gianni was waiting for me in the rain with his almost five years old son Iacopo at his side. We embraced each other and from that moment I had a true friend. Gianni was almost the same age as me. We both had young families and hence we discussed about life. We tried to understand why East Germany and other countries did not really succeed with building an alternative with respect to capitalistic economy. And what now? At the University of Pisa a corso di lingua italiana per stranieri (Italian language course for foreigners) was announced for the period February-April 1994. I had lost my job in Leipzig like about three thousand other scientists at the former Karl-Marx-Universität. So I could come again to Pisa.