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Italy mourns ‘girl who lit up the stars’

Italy on Sunday mourned the death of 91-year-old astrophysicist Margherita Hack, cherished for her simple, bewitching methods of narrating the universe and her fight for civil rights.

Published: 30 June 2013 18:07 CEST
Italy mourns 'girl who lit up the stars'
Margherita Hack, who died on Saturday, fought to legalise abortion and to secure gay rights. Photo: Flickr

"Goodbye Margherita Hack, lady of the stars," said the headline in La Repubblica, while Il Messaggero called her "friend of the skies" and La Stampa described her as "the girl who lit up the firmament".

Hack, who died in hospital on Saturday from heart problems, was the first woman to head an astronomical observatory in Italy, but she became a household name by speaking out on everything from astronomy to religion, civil rights and politics.

An atheist in overtly Catholic Italy, she described the Higgs boson particle as the real God, insisted there was almost certainly life beyond
Earth and campaigned hard to help legalise abortion and secure gay rights.

La Repubblica described her as "a hypnotic narrator, who dedicated increasing energy to describing the wonders of the stars and the universe."

For columnist Giovanna Caprara in Il Corriere della Sera, "stars, galaxies or life on other worlds with her became alluring adventures in which, with the
precision of the atheist, she separated concepts of science from religion."

"Like never before in our country, she brought heaven closer to earth."

Hack, who headed up the Trieste observatory in northern Italy from 1964 to 1987 and had a prestigious academic career, began her own studies in the literature department of Florence University, but changed to physics after just one class.

A life-long vegetarian and animal rights campaigner, Hack lived with eight cats and a dog and was married to her first love – who she met when she was just 11 years old.

Her plain-spoken passion earned her national esteem. Italian President Giorgio Napolitano lauded her as a "significant personality in the world of scientific culture" and a "strong example of civic passion" who leaves "a noble mark on public debate."

Newspapers were filled with the recollections of admirers and friends; how Hack foresaw the use of space satellites for astronomical observation, how she lobbied for the right to euthanasia, her love of poached eggs.

"It is impossible to separate the scientist from the nonconformity militant, her scientific rigour from her civic passion, her reverence of science from her awareness of doubt," said editorialist Antonio Galdo of Il Messaggero.

All appeared to take comfort or draw inspiration from her attitude to death.

"While I am here, there is no death," she once famously said in a television interview. "When death comes, I will no longer be here."

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ART

Berlin gives refuge to Rosa Parks’ Detroit house

Rosa Parks fled the American South for Detroit in the 1950s at the height of her civil rights struggle. Now the house where she sought asylum has itself found refuge in a city an ocean away: Berlin.

Published: 6 April 2017 09:03 CEST
Berlin gives refuge to Rosa Parks' Detroit house
Photo: Tobias Schwarz / AFP.

US artist Ryan Mendoza, who is based in the German capital, helped rescue the dilapidated two-storey structure from the wrecking ball and rebuilt it board by board in his garden. This week he will invite the public to have a look.

Mendoza, 45, says the house's odyssey holds up a mirror to two societies: his bitterly divided homeland grappling with the rise of President Donald Trump, and Germany, where more than a million people fleeing war and misery have sought asylum in the last two years.

“By disregarding this house, the United States has shown a disregard for civil rights,” Mendoza said, as he gave AFP a preview of the reconstructed clapboard structure in the city's ethnically diverse Wedding district.

“Civil rights are not just important for black people but also for white people who want to differentiate themselves from their racist forefathers. The Germans completely understand what this house has to say.”

Having lived in Europe for more than two decades, Mendoza said Berlin's earnest reckoning with its own dark history as well as a mood of “love and tolerance” made it the right haven for the house.

“Maybe it's not a coincidence that the city that is now taking into refuge this house is a city born out of a wall being broken down, and the country that is so intent on building a wall up is the country that has lost this house,” he said.

Forced to flee

Parks, an African-American seamstress, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1st 1955, triggering a wave of ultimately successful protests against racial segregation.

She became a hero of the international civil rights movement but relentless death threats in the South forced her to escape to Detroit, then a booming industrial city and a symbol of the American Dream.

Mendoza said the modest three-bedroom home at 2672 South Deacon Street housed 17 people – her brother's family – at the time Parks lived there, between 1957 and 1959. She never moved back to Alabama, and died in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 92.

Battered by floods and break-ins, the blighted house eventually ended up on the city's long demolition list.

Parks' niece Rhea McCauley, a retired artist, bought it back for $500 but was unable to raise the funds to restore it.

 Enter Mendoza and his wife Fabia, who had already transposed one Detroit house to Europe as part of an art project probing themes of rootlessness and displacement. They said they have become the “foster parents” of the Parks house.

McCauley, 69, said she is grateful to the Mendozas and is sure Parks herself would have approved of the move to Berlin.

“I love them for what they're doing for my aunt. Not very many people would have stepped up to the plate and, trust me, nobody did here in the United States,” she told AFP by telephone from Michigan.

'Not ready for Rosa'

Mendoza said he used the proceeds of paintings he sold to foot the $33,000-bill to deconstruct and transport the house.

Getting it across the Atlantic was a “very dangerous project”, he said.

“The chimney was listing and the back wall was very damaged and the floors were sagging,” he said.

Mendoza took the house apart over 18 days last August, packed it in shipping containers and gradually pieced it back together on a foundation he poured between his contemporary home and his studio.

He will showcase it for guests on Saturday, and again on the city's Gallery Weekend art festival April 28th-30th.

McCauley will fly to Germany for the open house and the premiere of a documentary about the project by Fabia, a Berlin native.

Visitors will not be able to enter the house but Mendoza will illuminate it from the inside and play 1950s-era music and news clips that Parks might have heard.

He has consciously left the traces of its long neglect, including its peeling paint. He said he is holding the house “hostage” until it can return to its rightful place in Detroit, with its “dignity restored”.

Mendoza has sought help from public and private US institutions as well as former first lady Michelle Obama, thus far without success.

“Here we have a house that is priceless, worth more than any waterfront villa that you can imagine,” Mendoza said.

“I would like to see it here for as short a time as possible. I totally love this house but this is not my house. I'm trying to give back as much as possible.”

However McCauley, who said she is alarmed and angered by the direction her country is taking under Trump, prefers the house stay in Berlin for a bit longer.

“The United States itself with the politicking and the disregard for human life – they're not ready for Auntie Rosa. I would have to wait until this country grows up.”

By Deborah Cole