Eva Caianiello: “My father, a pioneer of cybernetics between the United States and Naples”

A pioneer of cybernetics, a forerunner in the study of artificial intelligence and a scholar of quantum field theory, the Neapolitan Eduardo Renato Caianiello was also a cultural organiser who brought about significant development in Italian physics in the second half of the 20th century. A decisive factor for him, in the immediate post-war period, was the completion of his education in the United States, where, as the recipient of a scholarship at MIT in Boston, he stayed for about three years: a substantial collection of letters to his wife Carla Persico and to family members who had remained in Naples, collated by his second daughter Eva, won the Pieve Saverio Tutino Prize in 2025 and is due to be published by Il Mulino (“Dovunque la fisica fosse Fisica. Lettere 1948-1951”).

The correspondence not only captures Caianiello’s innermost thoughts, but also highlights the differences between two worlds and two vastly different academic circles: the euphoria of meeting great scientists, and the melancholy of being far from the city to which the young physicist would eventually choose to return. Eva, a mathematics lecturer and anthropologist, has also pieced together fragments of her own personal memories whilst compiling the correspondence.

The personal reason was his attachment to his family and the difficulty of moving them overseas, but also out of respect for my mother, who was deeply committed to her work as a teacher and had to look after their two daughters – who would later become four. However, there was another reason that convinced him: he felt he was a man of Magna Graecia; he wanted to expand his research on an international scale whilst keeping his base in Naples.

It was a relationship based on mutual respect and affection. Caccioppoli had been a witness at my parents’ wedding and had encouraged my father to stay in the US because he believed it was important for his development, even though, for ideological reasons, he did not like the United States.

He secured substantial funding from the US government and opened a new centre for the advanced school of theoretical and nuclear physics, with Werner Heisenberg delivering the introductory lecture. He worked to foster constant international exchanges of knowledge and pursued the goal of establishing a common language across scientific disciplines. He had been impressed by the work of Norbert Wiener and spearheaded a project involving the neuropsychiatrist Valentino Braitenberg, dedicated to neural networks, which stemmed from an interest in the functioning of the human brain. He was a tireless organiser: in 1968 he inaugurated the CNR’s Cybernetics Laboratory, independent of the university; in 1981 he founded IIASS (International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies); in 1989 he contributed to the establishment of SIREN, the Italian Society for Neural Networks, of which he was president until his death in 1993.

For him, classical studies were fundamental: in moments of solitude, he found comfort in Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers. He possessed a spirituality which I am not sure to what extent today’s engineers developing artificial intelligence possess. At the same time, he believed it was important for humanists to have a basic scientific grounding with which to underpin the judgements they make in life.

When my mother died, whilst clearing out the house, my sister Orietta gathered the collection of letters, which I then went through and reorganised in chronological order. I was unsure where to send them until I learnt of the National Diary Archive in Pieve Santo Stefano.

Enlightening and moving, the volume also features correspondence from before their time in America, focusing on Eduardo and Carla’s relationship prior to their marriage. Despite living in the same city, they exchanged letters constantly; each missive functioned as a mutual analysis rich in psychological insight.

While he was attending university, his father volunteered for the war effort. He survived the Battle of El Alamein but fractured his leg in Tunisia and managed to board the last hospital ship bound for Naples, where he was admitted to a medical facility and reunited with his mother, who was serving as a Red Cross nurse.

The house in Posillipo where I grew up was a meeting place for scientists from all over the world in a city that was experiencing the 1960s as a period of cultural vibrancy, whilst the seeds of the youth protest movement were already taking root. My father engaged calmly with his students because he was no aloof professor: he had learnt from the Americans that sense of ‘informality’ which was so rare in our universities at the time and which had become one of his defining traits. He always detested academic sycophancy and politics bent to mere personal ends.