Enzo Ferroni

Fontani M, Costa M, Oma MV (2015) The lost elements the periodic table s shadow side. Oxfrnd University Press, New York, p 307. (As recalled by Enzo Ferroni, a former student of Piccardi, in a 1997 interview with one of the authors and cited in)... 

Walther Hermann Nemst, the great German scientist, Nobel laureate in Chemistry, and father of the Third Law of Thermodynamics, had two Florentine disciples Luigi Rolla and Giorgio Piccardi. The latter became professor of physical chemistiy at the University of Florence. Piccardi had studied fluctuating phenomena well before Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003). His best disciple, later successor, was Enzo Ferroni who, upon Piccardi s retirement, was promoted to the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the Universily of Florence. Ferroni had also served as director of the Department of Chemistiy and Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Universily of Cagliari, Sardinia. 

He survived his beloved wife Paola—they married in 1946— by about a year. His wife s death, in fact, caused in him a sudden, and soon fatal, decline in health. Enzo Ferroni died in a Florence hospital on 9 April 2007 at age 86, after several years of suffering. The couple had no children or close relatives, but the memorial service was attended by a host of colleagues and former students—they arrived from all over. He would certainly have called them family. or his other children. His passing was mourned in Italy and abroad and those who received from Ferroni their first introduction to physical chemistry can certainly be regarded as a fortunate generation of chemists [32]. 

With the work of Enzo Ferroni, Ivano Bertini, Piero Paoletti (b. 1931), Lucia Band (b. 1954), Claudio Luchinat (b. 1952), Salvatore Califano (b. 1931), V. Schettino (b. 1936), Dante Gatteschi (b. 1945), Roberta Sessoli (b. 1963), Luigi Dei (b. 1956) and many others, it can be claimed that chemistry, in Florence, has lifted up its head and moved beyond its pale, almost ethereal, postwar image and has set its sights on a horizon far broader and more distant than the surrounding Tuscan hills. 

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