Roberto Bazzano, 61 years, was born in Savona, Liguria, and earned a degree in physics at Genoa University. He then found a good job in Genoa but he decided to move to the USA. That was at the beginning of the '80s. A master's at MIT of Boston followed, then a new job for five years at NASA and at the NRC. His life seemed bright and wonderful, dotted with several visits back in Italy. Then, because of sentimental reasons, he changed his life in a radical way: he moved back to Italy, opening a esoteric library. With books things did not work well and he moved again to London. By then he seemed to have lost the way and was forced to return to Italy, accepting all kinds of jobs: truck driver, nurse, delivery boy.
This sad story has gone around so much that an engineer working at Piaggio had offered him the chance to talk about his experience in a bar. The title of his first speech had been: 'From Eternity to here' and the second: 'Cosmology, first religion and then science.'
He spoke recently to a journalist and he told him: "I know they are arranging a speech abroad, but I don't know where. My life has been wonderful, and it is something like I have lived ten lives and never I would have thought to find so much kindness and solidarity here sitting on this bench."
During the last years he has been forced to beg in the streets and the spend his days sleeping on a wooden bench of Finale Ligure, Liguria. He keeps his head down, too ashamed to ask, but people walking around and knowing his plight freely give. He has put a cartoon paper in front of him with written on it: 'I am looking for a job, even for a day.' A stringer did interview him and publish an article on him in the local paper and since then his lot has slightly improved.
