Fermi Centre - Enrico Fermi Historical Museum of Physics and Study and Research Centre

Established by law no. 62 of 15 March 1999, the Enrico Fermi Historical Museum of Physics and Study and Research Centre (CREF) is located in the building that housed the historic Royal Institute of Physics on via Panisperna in the 1930s, where Enrico Fermi and a group of young physicists conducted the first important experiments for the future development of nuclear energy. Starting in 2019, with the official delivery of the restored building, the CREF's actual operational, scientific and museum phase began.

Here, Enrico Fermi, who took up the chair of Theoretical Physics in 1926, prepared the conditions that led to the birth of that group of young scholars who in the 1930s became famous as the “boys of Via Panisperna” (Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Oscar D’Agostino and Ettore Majorana). Under his scientific guidance, in fact, the experiments on the phenomenon of neutron-induced radioactivity began, fundamental research for understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus, the success of which was crowned with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Fermi in 1938.

The Fermi Museum, entitled “The Scientific Legacy of Enrico Fermi”, is housed on the ground floor of the monumental complex on via Panisperna, after careful and rigorous restoration. Inaugurated in 1881, under the direction of the physicist Pietro Blaserna from Gorizia, the Institute became an important creative environment in which the relationship with students was revolutionized, who were able to start using instruments and laboratories to carry out autonomous and original research. The idea was in fact to create a modern and cutting-edge physics school in Rome, in step with the major research centres of the time: from Cambridge to Göttingen, from Copenhagen to Paris, Berlin and Leiden.

The building itself is an integral part of the museum itinerary: in fact, an integral part of it is the internal courtyard, in the centre of which stands the famous fountain known as the “goldfish fountain”, the first Italian historical site of the European Physical Society since 2012; the entrance staircase, immortalized in 1931 on the occasion of the first international congress of nuclear physics attended by the most famous theoretical physicists of the time; up to the large corridors with vaulted ceilings on the first floor.

Today the Fermi Centre follows the teachings of the great scientist with a concrete commitment in the most advanced sectors of modern Physics, keeping in mind the value of interdisciplinarity in the realization of projects in which Physics interacts with other disciplines.

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