ITALY HAS A particular relationship with light. I don’t mean the refulgent perfections with which its painters illuminated the world: not Pisanello’s visionary silvered gleam, Botticelli’s aureate translucency or Titian’s richly dense shadows, but electric light, the kind that ruins your dinner from Messina to Milano.
Long before Thomas Edison got in on the act, a professor named Antonio Pacinotti at the university of Pisa perfected Faraday’s discovery of alternating current by producing the first direct current generator in 1860, which led to the opening of Italy’s first electricity plant in 1883.
DESPITE THIS HEAD START, Italians were
