“Andgoes Mameli Calvino … Everything about her is so feminine, from the name to the calm speech, to the polite aspect. A slightly stylized figurine, a head of dark hair styled with a braid like a halo, dressed in dark, small and modest “. This is how the journalist Camilla Bisi describes the scientist, interviewed on the occasion of the Biennale del Fiore in 1934. In contrast, Bisi adds the string of academic qualifications of Mameli, internationally renowned botanist, present at the fair as co-director and researcher of the Floriculture Experimental Station of Sanremo, directed by her husband Mario Calvinoagronomist and researcher in turn. A scientific-marriage partnershipblossomed in an adventurous way in Pavia, consolidated over the years spent in Cuba, in travels between South America, Mexico and New York and finally fully flourished in the Ligurian Riviera.
Eva Mameli with her husband Mario Calvino, married in 1920 and their son Italo, born in 1923. Photo from the Mario Fund and Eva Mameli Calvino courtesy of the “F. Corradi” Civic Library of the Municipality of Sanremo
After the death of their mother, in 1978, the children Italo – yes, the famous writer – and Floriano sell their parents’ houseVilla Meridiana (now condominium), and donated the immense documentary and photographic archive of the parents and the library to the Sanremo Civic Library. A fund that made it possible to reconstruct the history of one of the most important scientists of the early twentieth century (and her husband, himself a very important character), crossing him with correspondence, testimonies and with Italo’s texts. Many books were born, starting with The Secret Garden of the Calvino (De Ferrari, 2004), by Paola Forneris and Loretta Marchi, former director and librarian of the Sanremo Civic Library respectively, followed by Eva Mameli Calvino (Ali & No Editrice, 2010) by Elena Macellari, scholar and member of the Italian Botanical Society e Eva Mameli Calvino. The Cuban years, 1920-1925 (Franco Angeli, 2017) by Maria Cristina Secci, professor of linguistics and Spanish translation at the University of Cagliari. Works that have awakened interest in the great expert in botany.
Eva Mameli Calvino, the memory of Cuba
In the 1980s, as Loretta Marchi recalls, his memory had almost vanished in Sanremo, while he has always remained alive in Cuba. Reserved and rigorous, Mameli throughout her life makes dedication to research and the family her mission,also engaged on the social and environmental front ante litteram. “That life was also a waste, this my mother did not admit: that is, that it was also passion. Therefore she never went out of the garden labeled plant by plant, of the house carpeted with bougainvillea, of the study with the microscope under the bell jar and the herbaria. Without uncertainty, orderly, she transformed her passions into duty and lived by them “, Italo Calvino says in The road to San Giovanni.
Eva Mameli Calvino under the microscope and, in the background, her son Italo. Photo from the Mario and Eva Mameli Calvino Collection courtesy of the “F. Corradi” Civic Library of the Municipality of Sanremo
Eva, born Giuliana Evelina, was born in Sassari in 1886, fourth of five children, in the bosom of an upper middle-class family (Goffredo Mameli, author of the hymn Fratelli d ‘Italia, was a cousin of his father, colonel of the carabinieri ). After high school – only girl – Eva in 1905 graduated in mathematics at the University of Cagliari. Then he joined his beloved brother Efisio, professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Pavia, and in 1907 he graduated in Natural Sciences. Among his masters, Rina Monti, the first woman to fill the role of full professor in the Kingdom of Italy.
A couple united by a love of science
In 1915 she became a lecturer in botany, herself the first woman to achieve the title, and in 1919 she also received the prize for natural sciences from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In the life of a scholar (apart from the parenthesis of her who sees her Red Cross nurse during the First World War, silver medal of the Red Cross and bronze medal of the Ministry of the Interior) she suddenly bursts Mario Calvino. Director of the Experimental Agronomic Station of Santiago de Las Vegas, he had returned to Italy from Cuba for a congress and to find a wife, better if you have a degree in botany. Eva was the perfect “candidate”. Calvino unexpectedly shows up in Pavia and proposes to marry him. According to Maria Cristina Secci, they had probably already met in academia, but the decision was lightning-fast and after a civil ceremony in Pavia, on October 30, 1920, husband and wife embarked on the Aquitania transatlantic liner in Southampton, heading for America. Eva does not hesitate to leave everything she had conquered.
At 34, marriage and the lure of an unimaginable research experience in Italy are perhaps irresistible. In Santiago de las Vegas, in an international scientific environment, he directs the Botany Department of the Experimental Station. Intense years of life (Italo was born here), experiments, travels and social commitment through various initiatives, including an agricultural school in the town of Chaparra. In 1925 he returned to Italy, in Sanremo, the city of Mario, where he took over the management of the Experimental Floriculture Station. A curiosity: it is to them that we owe the introduction in Italy of subtropical varieties, such as avocado and, even more importantly, the development of Sanremo’s floriculture. The Calvino house, Villa Meridiana, surrounded by 3000 square meters of lush experimental garden, unfortunately lost, also houses the offices of the Station. The unstoppable Eve, who never abandoned academic dreams, in 1926 he won the chair of botany at the University of Cagliari.
With her husband at Villa Meridiana, in Sanremo. Photo from the Mario and Eva Mameli Calvino Collection courtesy of the “F. Corradi” Civic Library of the Municipality of Sanremo
It is another first: she is the first woman to fill this position. At the same time she becomes director of the Botanical Garden (she also talks about it the Dutch writer Jan Brokken in The soul of the cities, Iperborea). For a while she reconciles university commitments and family – her mother Maddalena Cubeddu lives with them – but commuting between Liguria and Sardinia is not easy, especially after the birth of her second child. Much to the uproar of the academic world, she resigned in 1929.
A muse for Design Week
It is not an abandonment of research which, on the contrary, continues more closely at the Station, together with the dissemination activity (with her husband she founded the magazine Il giardino fiorito). They were happy years: Eva and Mario share everything, the scientific successes, the secular vision of life and the civic sense, which they instill in Italo and Floriano. Anti-fascists, during the Second World War they are arrested by the Germans who stage a fake shooting to induce them to reveal where their children are, went with the partisans. Widow in 1951, Eva succeeds the management of the Experimental Station until 1959. In 1970 she wrote to her friend Olga Resnevič Signorelli: «For more than two years I have been preparing a work on botanical etymology and I will have as many …». The monumental Etymological dictionary of generic and specific names of flowering and ornamental plantsis his latest work, published in 1972.
After years of silence, in 2011 his figure is rediscovered in the exhibition The women who made Italy great, organized on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Unification followed, in 2018, by the stamp of the series dedicated to the Italian female genius (Excellence of knowledge). Talking about it today is also paying homage to the mother of the writer Italo Calvino, whose centenary of her birth is celebrated in 2023. In the meantime, the Istituto Europeo di Design is dedicating a space to her during the next Milanese Design Week, from 6 to 12 June, in the context of Absolute Beginners, in which ten visionary women of the present and the past inspire the works of the students of the various branches of the institute. For that of Cagliari Paola Riviezzo, teacher and architect, proposed Eva Mameli Calvino. She is so modern that she is still a model and a muse.
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