Luisa Cifarelli - Laura Bassi–The Worlds First Woman Professor in Natural Philosophy: An Iconic Physicist in Enlightenment Italy

The books published in the Springer Biographies tell of the life and work of scholars, innovators, and pioneers in all fields of learning and throughout the ages. Prominent scientists and philosophers will feature, but so too will lesser known personalities whose significant contributions deserve greater recognition and whose remarkable life stories will stir and motivate readers. Authored by historians and other academic writers, the volumes describe and analyse the main achievements of their subjects in manner accessible to nonspecialists, interweaving these with salient aspects of the protagonists personal lives. Autobiographies and memoirs also fall into the scope of the series.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13617

Portrait of Laura Bassi, Carlo Vandi, oil on canvas, 18th century, Bologna, Museo di Palazzo Poggi.

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Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti, known as Laura Bassi, was born in Bologna in 1711. In 1732, at the age of 21, she became the first female member of the influential Accademia dellIstituto delle Scienze in Bologna and was the first woman in the world to be appointed to a University chair to teach universal philosophy (1732) and then experimental physics (1776).

On the occasion of the tercentenary of her birth, the University of Bologna organised an exhibition, a number of lectures and a conference, and the Accademia itself established a Forum Laura Bassi which since then, every year, focuses on themes of topical interest. On the same occasion, the Societ Italiana di Fisica (SIF) and the Societ Italiana di Storia della Scienza (SISS) have taken the initiativeincidentally, being both led then by female professors of the University of Bologna and at the same time members of the Accademiato publish a volume on Laura Bassi to pay a tribute to her in a way that would leave a lasting memory for the future and could mark a starting point to promote further analyses. And so the idea of the volume LAURA BASSI: EMBLEM AND PRIMACY IN SETTECENTO SCIENCE was born. This volume, appeared in 2012, was a collection of writings by various experts which aimed to illustrate the personality and work of Laura Bassi, as well as the characters who most influenced her education and her research activity, and, at the same time, to underline the main features of the physics of the eighteenth century in the frame of which this scientist operated. To make it easier to read and to foster the widest possible circulation, the volume consisted in an Italian version at the beginning and an English translation at the end. A plentiful selection of attractive and telling pictures of the epoch, pertaining to Laura Bassi, the scientific context of the time and particularly the instrumentation referred to in the various essays, provided a lively and colourful interval in the passage from one language to the other.

A few years later, in 2019, a Laura Bassi Medal, intended for its most meritorious PhD graduates, has been established by the University of Bologna (among other similar medals named after Petrarch, Copernicus, Accursius and Marconi). In 2019, the new icebreaker ship of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS) for scientific research in the Antarctic has been named Laura Bassi. And in 2020, a special documentary dedicated to Laura Bassi has been produced, which will be broadcast on the major Italian national television channel in the framework of the very popular and renowned show RAI Storia.

For all the above, the SIF, in collaboration with Springer, has decided to publish the present volume in the Springer Biographies series, as a new revised and updated edition of the previous one, in order to revamp and widen the knowledge of this extraordinary woman.

The book opens with an essay by Walter Tega who examines in an innovative way the distinguished figure of Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, scientist, oceanographer, soldier, member of the Royal Society and well known in Europe precisely for his exceptional gifts as a naturalist, the guiding spirit behind the creation of the Istituto delle Scienze which was founded in 1711 when its Costituzioni were approved on 12 December.

The project devised by Marsili was ambitious and original, aiming to house the entire encyclopedia of modern scientific knowledge in the rooms of an ancient senatorial residence in Bologna. A series of laboratories, galleries, workshops, laid out over the two floors of Palazzo Poggi (to which must be added the Specola (Observatory), designed in 1711 and only completed in 1726, and the library, built according to a design by Carlo Francesco Dotti, created according to the wishes of Pope Prospero Lambertini in the middle of the century), made the Istituto, from its very beginning, not just a place for discussion similar to that offered by the numerous scientific academies active within the Rpublique des Lettres, but also a venue where the sciences could be cultivated experimentally, an unquestionably rarer thing.