From the life of the future luminary, considered one of the most famous scholars of DNA and anxiety, a child during the war, left alone and surviving on the street, a film by Roberto Faenza entitled “Hill of Vision” was born.
Hate! Won’t it be boring to live to be one hundred and forty years old? He laughs: “No, as long as one is happy, productive and in love at that age.” This is the crux, he explains Mario Capecchi, Nobel Prize in Medicine 2007: «It depends on how you get there. Sure, it will take some time. But theoretically … A shark was found under the Arctic ice sheet and it is estimated that it was over 500 years old. If an animal can do it, why not human beings? ».
After all, he has already lived two lives at 85 years of age. This one today, in which he is one of the most famous scholars in the world in the field of research on DNA and anxiety. And that of yesterday, in which he was a child overwhelmed by the Second World War, left without father and mother and incredibly survived wandering all alone in the Atesine valleys and the Po valley, recovering a little food, some clothes, a refuge for the coldest nights each time. Until, many years and many triumphs later, he earned the title of «Oliver Twist of Genetics».
An amazing story. Told by director Roberto Faenza in a film, Hill of vision, with Laura Haddock, Edward Holcroft, Elisa Lasowski, Jake Donald-Crookes and based on the memories that the same scientist, who will be present on Saturday 26 March for the first in Bari, recognizes as uncertain here and there. It is not easy, if you grew up “in disarray, just to survive, like an animal”, to keep in mind dates, places, details: “My mother was the kindest and most caring person I have ever met. And I doubt she would ever knowingly pass on false information to me – she explained to Isabelle Hansen of the long ago
“Dolomites”
– however as a scientist I am aware that all the sources cited may not be perfect ».
It is certain that little Mario, born in Verona in October 1937, was the fruit of a stormy relationship between two people who could not have been more different. He, Luciano Capecchi, was a fascist aviator and gunner, a combative spirit, brusque and bellicose manner, raised in Reggio Emilia. She, Lucy Ramberg, daughter of Lucy Dodd-Ramberg, rich and famous painter from Portland and a German archaeologist, who grew up with her two brothers in a villa in Florence, was cultured, intelligent, spoke “half a dozen languages”, had studied at the Sorbonne and was of liberal ideas, if anything a little bohemian and anti-fascist: “Their was love at first sight – the son will say – but luckily my mother decided not to marry him”.
How things went is not known but at a certain point Lucy, perhaps fleeing from her fascist companion, went to live with her little son in an out-of-the-way district on the Renon plateau, above Bolzano. Where she, fearing being accused of having relations with anti-fascists, she decided one day to change the air, collecting all the money and valuables she owned to entrust the child to a Tyrolean family she thought she could trust. After which she, found by the Italian or German police, she would end up in a prison camp “near Munich”. Dachau, as Mario had always understood? From subsequent checks it seems not. Therefore? Mystery. How the birth of a second daughter would remain mysteriousMarlene, discovered by the scientist fifteen years ago.
The fact is that after a year or so the child, when he is not yet five years old, disappears from Renon. Thrown out by the German family who hosted him and feared trouble with the police? Mah .. Difficult, at that age, to understand some things too big for a child. Returning up there after having won the Nobel Prize and having found the places where he had spent that “clandestine” period, Capecchi himself says he does not feel “any grudge. I don’t know what really happened. I believe the cause was economic. They had little and had to take care of themselves. Maybe the money my mother had left was gone, maybe my father had intimidated them, I don’t know … ». Maybe it was he who felt burdened and ran away. Or dad to take him away (“I have no memory”) to Reggio. Dark.
What is certain is that the coexistence between Luciano Capecchi (destined to die in an air battle in Africa) and his son, as the film from Faenza reconstructs, was very complicated. To the point that Mario will tell, in an “autobiographical sketch” written on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, that he lived in his father’s house in Reggio for a total of no more than three weeks: “I was asked why I did not live with him for a very long time. longer. He was extremely violent. In the midst of all the horrors of war, perhaps the hardest thing for me to accept as a child was having a brutal father with me. ‘ Better the road, rather: «I had to learn how to survive. How to protect myself. How to get food. What I ate I stole. I had become a very good thief. I observed people. And I needed these observations to get food. This was my school: I learned to be self-sufficient ».
The Pious Institute of Craftsmen, his beloved orphanage in Reggio was a lifeline for him. It was directed by Don Gaetano Incerti, a monumental priest described by the Nobel Prize as “one of the very few men I met in Reggio who showed compassion for children and was interested in me”. Dino Salati recalls: «Mario was my classmate. He was blond. We were always hungry. We went to pray every day for there to be food the next day as well. Always hungry, so hungry … ».
Until, finally, one day Lucy appeared: «She had survived her imprisonment and found me on 6 October 1936: the day of my ninth birthday. I didn’t recognize her. In a few years she had aged a lifetime. She took me to buy a Tyrolean suit, with hat and feather ». A few weeks and, having taken a ticket for the ship, they left for America: “I expected to find streets paved with gold: I found more, opportunities.”
She ended up at the home of her mother’s brother, Uncle Edward, a physicist, in a Quaker community in Pennsylvania: “I suddenly went from having no parents to being sixty-five.” The difficult and traumatic childhood, however, had dragged it along. Too wild, too sensitive, too turbulent. Enough to be thrown out of schools. “Until my uncle Edward and my aunt Sarah, who had accepted the challenge of converting me into a productive human being.”
Once he left he never stopped. A few months to learn to read and write in English, a handful of years for the degree, a breathtaking race for the doctorate. And then off, from laboratory to laboratory, from university to university: “Every three months we packed our bags and left for a new city and a new work experience”. Up to the Nobel Prize for DNA studies. The ultimate proof of how accumulating as much experience as possible can be extraordinarily useful. Even those against the tide. Like when he left America’s most prestigious centers to move to Salt Lake City, Utah, being persuaded by a colleague after a ride “along a series of mountain lakes bursting with trout.” Considered today perhaps the world’s leading expert on anxiety (“We do not have data yet but after having seen the peaks reached with the pandemic, I am sure that the war in Ukraine will bring very serious problems”) he says he has only one great regret: never having succeeded talking about many things with her mother Lucy, a wonderful, fragile, absent creature. In his house in the Rocky Mountains he has a trunk with his things. He confides to his friends that he has never been able to open it.
The director: Stubbornness and passion, this is how the project was born
«We have been working on this film for fifteen years, or rather since 2007, since Elda Ferri and I learned about the life of Mario Capecchi, Nobel Prize for Medicine. His mother Lucy, an American, is arrested by the Nazi-fascists and deported to Dachau, and Mario at the age of 4 is abandoned in the mountains of Bolzano. How can such a small child survive living for the day … ». These words written by director Roberto Faenza explain better than anything else why behind Hill of Vision there is above all the obstinate passion of those who have fallen in love with this wonderful story. The film, produced by Jean Vigo Italia with Rai Cinema, sees the participation of actors of the caliber of Laura Haddock, Edward Holcroft, Elisa Lasowski. And again: Jake Donald-Crookes (in the role of Mario Capecchi as a boy), Lorenzo Ciamei (Mario as a child) and Francesco Montanari who plays Mario’s father, Luciano Capecchi. Hill of Vision is the name of the Quaker community that welcomed Mario and his mother to America.
The presentation on March 26 in Bari
«Hill of Vision»Will be presented on Saturday 26 March at the Bari International Film Festival. The film is a Jean Vigo Italia production with Rai Cinema
March 23, 2022 (change March 23, 2022 | 20:51)
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