Via Panisperna boys and the centomila Majorana: the facts and the literary and audiovisual versions

Abstract

While a certain novel ponders about the traces left by Ettore Majorana and expounds some theories about the fate of the character mysteriously disappeared, a movie by Gianni Amelio also inspirited by facts goes through another path, of the story of Via Panisperna boys, stressing the enigmatic figure of Ettore Majorana and the exciting episodes surrounding some of the greatest physicists of the world. When Leonardo Sciascia publishes the novel in which he uses the actual fact of Ettore Majorana’s disappearance in order to create what he calls a “philosophical novel of mystery”, the public had already probably forgotten the intriguing events of 1938: the young and bright physicist disappeared, by all accounts, voluntarily, without leaving proofs of his death or reliable evidence of his whereabouts. In 1972, Sciascia learns about mysterious clues by means of Erasmo Recami and considers the motives that could have made  Majorana leave Italy and later abandon his life almost in the mode fictionalized by Pirandello.