Gino Fano in Svizzera (1939-1945)

Dispossessed of his chair, banned from scientific and academic arenas and unable to tolerate «the reduction to a caste of pariahs», Gino Fano left Turin for Switzerland in 1938, settling in Lausanne. He would remain here until 1945, engaging in three areas: solidarity, teaching in the courses organized for Italian university students interned in the Lausanne and Huttwil camps; and dissemination, through a series of conferences on Italian algebraic geometry that he held at the Cercle Mathématique. In this paper we will focus on the Swiss period of Fano’s personal and professional trajectory, seven years generally dismissed as theunpleasant and unjust epilogue of a highly successful scientific life, and that by contrast are not, in the measure that they return a broader narrative: that of Jewish scholars, trained in the Belle Époque of scientific internationalism, who saw the principles of the rule of law denied by race theories, and who witnessed the perversion of collective consciences under totalitarian regimes.