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Fabio Fumi
 Born in Milan (because of an ongoing war) from Triestine parents something less than two thirds of a century ago, he first sees his own city two years later. Here in Trieste he grows up, dreams and learns the basics of life in an improbable environment made of three lonely houses in the middle of a green nowhere right over the sea, a dream from where he gets brutally torn off at the age of 10 to be fed to the miseries of the city proper. He survives the classical education and the doctorate of Physics without apparent damage, yet in those key-years the heavy heel of an Authority willing to teach a youngster the hard way who's the real master vaccinates him for life against bureaucracy, values accepted without arguing, status quo, the ubiquitous unquestionable "because that's the way it is" and the boor prepotence of those having more authority than brains to enforce it. Thus, declining some promising careers in scientific environments all in the hands of the State, once his education is completed he opts for offering himself on the free market as a professional consultant first and as an independent R&D Company later. This way he quite unexpectedly succeeds making a life not only acceptable but also agreeably filled with challenges and satisfactions both human and scientific. Although most of his activity takes place abroad where the norms are less pointlessly restrictive, at the age of 30 he accepts almost as a hobby a proffered part-time job as a teacher at the Trieste University, but a few months later he feels compelled to leave it with the middle finger of his right hand raised in a blessing gesture because of the hypertrophic, humiliating and self-fulfilling bureaucracy that uses to reign in such forlorn institutions. In the very middle of the middle age, with a determinant contribution by his companion, wife and colleague, he inadvertently reproduces himself; the fruit of the guilt sees the light in Switzerland, Lausanne, being at the time the happy couple engaged in an interesting and challenging work in Le Locle. Some ten years afterwards his Company croaks together with so many others, choked by countless pointless norms and bled to death by the increasing tax pressure of a State unable to see the logical link between cows butchering and milk shortage. After several vain and rather frustrating attempts to find a dignified job in his still unreasonably beloved city, sad and unwilling he resolves to look once more abroad, and gets promptly accepted in an international research Institute. Here he still keeps cashing the daily satisfaction of co-operating in a sensible, interesting and damn complex project, and reckons with doing so until death them part. He currently lives in a small and very nice university town where people are affable and polite, the Authority is discrete, meddles pretty little and doesn't cheat, the streets are clean, and cars stop by the red light. Due to these and other factors not always measurable but nevertheless utterly important, in the course of a few years the regret for his Trieste so badly left behind has gradually thinned down to a very mild melancholy and the desire to go back has vanished almost entirely. He speaks and writes several (mostly) European languages, indulges in many hobbies (not last the compilation of a polyglot anthology of quotations that nobody ever took the trouble to utter before), lives amid trees and bushes as he used to as a child and bursts into inordinate guffaw any time someone mentions before him the exquisitely Italian tragedy of "brains fled abroad". |