Advances in Historical Studies
2013. Vol.2, No.3
Published Online September 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ahs)
Remembering Professor Mauro Francaviglia
Luciana De Rose
Department of History , University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy
Received September 2013
Copyright © 2013 Luciana De Rose. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons At-
tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
Omnivorous, omnipresent, omniscient.
Three omnigenous adjectives that convey the (omniGenius)
personality of our beloved late Professor Mauro Francaviglia.
Omnivorous: he fed on culture in the broadest sense.
He was a well-rounded scholar, he liked to be nourished by
“knowledge” rather than study only his discipline. It was diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to find him unprepared on a topic. He
could speak about science, philately, religion, culinary arts,
esotericism, among the others. And this love for the intellectual
activities has multiplied when he met Marcella Giulia Lorenzi,
his wife, the love of his life, which has opened to him the doors
of art. Flattered by the new lines of research, through his works
Francaviglia helped the academic and scientific world to in-
crease the interest towards the interdisciplinary synergy be-
tween science and art, after many years of closure, of en-
trenchment in their disciplinary boundaries.
Omnipresent: the eclectic personality and intellectual appe-
tite lead Mauro to attend as much as possible cultural events of
various disciplines, fluttering from one to another.
I remember him at conferences on history and archaeology,
or palaeontology, when he could always phrase the question
intelligently, or intervene with an acute and always appropriate
observation. The doctrinal oxymoron is only apparent, thanks
to its preparation Francaviglia was able to makes links to phys-
ics and mathematics in any speech, but also to assimilate dif-
ferent disciplines and digest all matters making his personal
connections and finding original outcomes. His special gift was
offering to the public the result of this reprocessing, so to make
it simple and easy to digest even to those who were starving yet
striving for culture.
Omniscient: the third adjective is nothing more than the
summa of the previous ones.
Francaviglia loved nourishing himself with study and work,
the result was his person, inwardly rich and never pedantic,
humble in his desire to learn and resolute with other people’s
rudeness, generous in teaching and learning. Goodbye Mauro,
we will remember you when we will see a butterfly flapping its
wings ... but we will do it for science, not for rhetoric.
Figure 1.
Prof. Mauro Francaviglia. Opening of the XIX SIGRAV Conference on
General Relativity and Gravitational Physics, Scuola Normale Superi-
ore Pisa, 2010. Photo Copyri gh t Marcella Giulia Lorenzi.