Mikhail’s Papers Set Ablaze

“Give Vincenzino a kicking because he didn’t trim his sideburns.” Rough, hasty, surprising words, jotted down in the top right corner of an important scientific publication by Renato’s fearsome and eccentric aunt, Maria Bakunin, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Naples. Vincenzo is the janitor of the institute, subjected like many others to the violent and irascible character of the professor, who my grandfather met in Belgium when he was studying engineering in Liège. She arrived there in 1913, sent by the minister Francesco Saverio Nitti to find out about “the direction given to the teaching of Chemistry and the results achieved in terms of teaching and the implications for industry”. Maria Bakunin visits eleven professional institutes and it is during one of these meetings that Lorenzo Caccioppoli encounters her. For my grandfather, laconic and ferocious, she was the Witch from that moment on. For all the academic world, who reveres and fears her, she is instead the Lady.