From the deaths of Ernest Hemingway ed Ennio Morricone to the establishment of Montedison, from Darwin and Wallace’s theories on evolution to the discovery of the Higgs boson, from Cossiga as President of the Republic to the victory of the African-American tennis player Ashe at Wimbledon. Facts and characters that intertwine in the anniversaries of the week from 1st to 7th July, chosen and commented by Mario SechiDirector of Libero and columnist a The day and the historythe Rai Cultura program created by John Paul Fontanabroadcast every day at five past midnight, and repeated at 08.30, 11.30, 14.00 and 20.10 on Rai Storia.
It begins on Monday 1st July, the day in 1858, Charles Darwin e Alfred Wallace present their writings on evolution at the Linnean Society in London. Having arrived at the formulation of the theory of evolution by different paths, Wallace recognizes the primacy of the idea in Darwin. Tuesday 2 July is the anniversary of the death of the American writer Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide in 1961. Among his most famous novels: “Fiesta”, “A Farewell to Arms”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, The Old Man and the Sea” In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Wednesday 3 July marks the swearing-in of Francesco Cossiga as President of the Republic, in 1985. In his first message to Parliament, Cossiga appeals to ordinary people and to the need for institutional renewal.
Thursday 4 July, in the foreground the announcement of a group of scientists from CERN in Geneva which, in 2012, detected the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence had been predicted by British physicist Peter Higgs since 1964.
On Friday 5 July the protagonist is the African-American tennis player Arthur Ashe who in 1975 won the Wimbledon tournament, beating his compatriot Jimmy Connors. He is the first, and so far only, black athlete to win the men’s final of the English tournament, in addition to two other Grand Slam titles.
On Saturday 6 July the memory goes to Ennio Morricone, one of the greatest composers of soundtracks, who died in Rome in 2020. It was at the beginning of the Sixties that he began to try his hand at music for cinema and in this field he achieved global success thanks to compositions for Sergio Leone’s films. In the following decades Morricone wrote the music for the films of Petri, Pasolini, Bertolucci and Tornatore and collaborated with international directors such as Joffè, De Palma, Polansky and Tarantino, with whom he won the Oscar in 2016 for the soundtrack of “The hateful Eight ” after winning the Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007. Also in 2016, Hollywood dedicated him a well-deserved star in the famous “Walk of fame”.
Director Sechi’s week ends on Sunday 7th July with the reconstruction of the birth of Montedison in 1966. The Italian chemical giant was formed from the merger between Montecatini, the country’s largest chemical company, and Edison, the number one in the electrical energy field.
