The winners of the Thirty-eighth Nonino Prize

Peter Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in the Elswick district of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He graduated with 1st class Honours in Physics from King’s College, University of London, in 1950. A year later, he was awarded an MSc and started research. In 1954, he was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled 'Some Problems in the Theory of Molecular Vibrations', work which signalled the start of his life-long interest in the application of the ideas of symmetry to physical systems.

In 1954, Peter Higgs moved to the University of Edinburgh for his second year as a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Senior Student, and remained for a further year as a Senior Research Fellow. He returned to London in 1956 to take up an ICI Research Fellowship. He spent a year at University College and a little over a year at Imperial College, before taking up an appointment as Temporary Lecturer in Mathematics at University College. In October 1960 Peter Higgs returned to Edinburgh, taking up a lectureship in Mathematical Physics at the Tait Institute and then he was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics. In 1974 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1983 of the Royal Society, London. He retired in 1996, becoming Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.

He is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called” Higgs mechanism” predicts the existence of a new sub-atomic particle, called the “Higgs boson”, which, to Higgs’s regret, is also known to the public with the nickname of “God’s particle”.

Higgs had the intuition of his theory in 1964, during a walk in the Craigorms; when he returned to his laboratory, he declared he had had “one big idea”.

Though the Higgs boson had not been detected yet in particle acceleration experiments, the Higgs mechanism was generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model, and it was expected that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, the greatest particle accelerator ever built, which started to supply data in November 2009, could prove its existence.

On 13 December 2011, CERN reported that two independent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had seen "tantalizing hints" of the existence of the Higgs boson.

On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the ATLAS and CMS experiments had seen strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson. At the announcement, sitting in the audience, Higgs himself was present and he welcomed the news clearly moved.

For his great contribution to theoretical physics, Peter Higgs has been awarded several prizes, acknowledgements and honorary graduations, among which the Dirac medal and the Wolf Prize for Physics. The scientists, however, refused to collect this prize, managed by an Israeli foundation, declaring he did not share the country’s aggressive policy towards Palestine.

In 2011, Peter Higgs was given the Edinburgh Award for his important contribution to the town. In December 2012 he was awarded by the Queen “Companion of Honour”, an order of merit created in 1917, whose members are the Sovereign and other 65 personalities.

FABIOLA GIANOTTI, born in Rome in 1962 is an Italian physicist.
She got a classic diploma and a piano diploma at the Conservatory of Milan.
She graduated in Physics (110/110 magna cum laude) at the University of Milan.
In 1989 she obtained a PhD in sub-nuclear physics from the University of Milan.
In 1994 she was granted a scholarship for young physicists at CERN in Geneva, and in 1996 she became a permanent research physicist of that laboratory. She has contributed to several experiments (UA2, ALEPH, ATLAS) working at the development and building of data detectors and analysis.
Since March 1st 2009 she has been in charge of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hardon Collider (LHC) at CERN, one of the most complex and ambitious scientific projects of all times, with 3000 scientists of 38 countries participating.

She is (co-)author of more than 300 articles on scientific publications and has given about 30 plenary presentations upon invitation at the most important lectures in her field.
She has been a member of several international scientific boards among which the Physics Advisory Committee of the Fermilab laboratory in Chicago, The European Physics Society Council, and the Scientific Council of CNRS in France.

In March 2009 she was conferred the title of “Commendatore dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica” by President Giorgio Napolitano.
Since March 2010 she has been a member of the Committee of Experts for Research Politics (CEPR), a body presided by the Ministry of Research.
In March 2011 she was included by the English newspaper “The Guardian” in the “100 most inspirational women” in all fields (7 of which in the fields of science and medicine).
In January 2012 she obtained an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala (Sweden).
On July 4th 2012 she presented, in a seminar at CERN, the results of the research of the Higgs boson with the ATLAS experiment, and reported the discovery of this particle.
In September 2012 she was conferred the title of “Grande Ufficiale dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica” by President Giorgio Napolitano.
In October 2012 she was elected member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
On December 7th 2012 she received the Gold Medal of civic decoration of the Municipality of Milan (“Ambrogino d’Oro”).
In December 2012 she was awarded the Special Fundamental Physics Prize by the Milner Foundation.
In December 2012 she was ranked the 2012 fifth most important personality by Time magazine, which dedicated her also a cover.

Born in 1950. One of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation, Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Region of Unlikeness (1991), The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1992 (1995) winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Never (2002), Sea Change (2008), and Place (2012), among others. Born in New York City, Graham was raised and educated in Italy and France. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied philosophy, and New York University, where she pursued filmmaking. While in New York, she began writing and studying poetry, and went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She later taught at the Writers’ Workshop, leaving to join the faculty at Harvard as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position previously held by Seamus Heaney and a chair whose occupants date back to John Quincy Adams. She was the first woman to be awarded this position.

Jorie Graham is known for her deep interest in history, language, and perception; the critic Calvin Bedient has noted that she is, “never less than in dialogue with everything. She is the world champion at shot-putting the great questions. It hardly matters what the title is: the subject itself is always ‘the outermost question being asked me by the World today.’ What counts is the hope in the questioning itself, not the answers.” Graham has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Visual art, mythology, history, and philosophy are central to Graham’s work. The influences of her mother, a sculptor, and father, a journalist, her tri-lingual upbringing, and her early immersion in European culture are all evident in her poetry. Her influences are predominantly modernists—William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, among others—and help explain the shape and flow of her poetry, which is marked by a reliance on line as a unit of sense and perception. Using long and short lines, indentation and spacing, Graham’s forms explore the dualities and polarities of life, of the creative and destructive tensions that exist between spirit and flesh, the real and the mythical, stillness and motion, the interior and exterior existence.

Through her collections of poetry, Graham’s distinctive style has evolved to accommodate both new kinds of experience and new kinds of reading. In the Paris Review, Graham noted of her shift from the long sentence-like lines of The End of Beauty to the shorter lyrical line of Region of Unlikeness: “I wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience—which includes philosophical discursiveness—to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward... It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession. A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.” Graham’s interest in the reader’s experience of her work, and the power of poetry to reshape perceptions of the world, runs through all her books.

Critic David Baker once wrote that he could “think of no other current American poet who has employed and exposed the actual mechanics of narrative, of form, of strategic inquiry more fully than she has—at least no other readable poet—and no other poet able to deploy so fruitfully and invitingly the diverse systems of philosophy, science, and history. If anyone can unify the disjoined fields of contemporary discourse, I think it might be Jorie Graham.” Graham herself has a different understanding of the potential of her work, and poetry generally. “I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion,” she told the Paris Review. “Its syntax wants to pass something on to another in the way that you can, for example, pass laughter on. It’s different from being persuasive and making an argument. That’s why great poems have so few arguments in them. They don’t want to make the reader ‘agree.’ They don’t want to move through the head that way. They want to go from body to body. Built in is the belief that such community—could one even say ceremony—might ‘save’ the world.” She gives poetry readings.

Among her poetry books, besides the ones already quoted, we mention Materialism: Poems, Ecco Press, 1993; The Errancy, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1997. Swarm, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 2000; Overlord, Ecco Press, 2005.

Michael Pollan is an author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He was born on February 6th 1955 in Long Island, New York. In 1977 he graduates in English at the Bennington College and obtains an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1981.
He is married to landscape painter Judith Belzer. They have a son.

In 2006 the New York Times describes him as “an intellectual free philosopher of food”.
In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan describes four basic ways that human societies have obtained food: the current industrial system, the big organic operation, the local self-sufficient farm, and the hunter-gatherer. Pollan follows each of these processes—from a group of plants photosynthesizing calories through a series of intermediate stages, ultimately into a meal. Along the way, he suggests that there is a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world, and that industrial eating obscures crucially important ecological relationships and connections. In December 2006 The New York Times named The Omnivore's Dilemma one of the five best nonfiction books of the year. On May 8, 2007, the James Beard Foundation named The Omnivore's Dilemma its 2007 winner for the best food writing.

Pollan's discussion of the industrial food chain is in large part a critique of modern agribusiness. According to the book, agribusiness has lost touch with the natural cycles of farming, wherein livestock and crops intertwine in mutually beneficial circles. Pollan's critique of modern agribusiness focuses on what he describes as the overuse of corn for purposes ranging from fattening cattle to massive production of corn oil, high-fructose corn syrup, and other corn derivatives. He describes what he sees as the inefficiencies and other drawbacks of factory farming and gives his assessment of organic food production and what it's like to hunt and gather food. He blames those who set the rules (i.e., politicians in Washington, D.C., bureaucrats at the United States Department of Agriculture, Wall Street capitalists, and agricultural conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland) of what he calls a destructive and precarious agricultural system that has wrought havoc upon the diet, nutrition, and well-being of Americans. Pollan finds hope in Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia, which he sees as a model of sustainability in commercial farming.

In The Botany of Desire, Pollan explores the concept of co-evolution, specifically of humankind's evolutionary relationship with four plants — apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes — from the dual perspectives of humans and the plants. He uses case examples that fit the archetype of four basic human desires, demonstrating how each of these botanical species are selectively grown, bred, and genetically engineered. The apple reflects the desire for sweetness, the tulip beauty, the marijuana intoxication, and the potato control. Pollan then unravels the narrative of his own experience with each of the plants, which he intertwines with a well-researched exploration into their social history.

In his book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, (2008), he explores the relationship with what he terms nutritionism and the Western diet, with a focus on late 20th century food advice given by the science community. Pollan holds that consumption of fat and dietary cholesterol do not lead to a higher rate of coronary disease, and that the reductive analysis of food into nutrient components is a flawed paradigm. He questions the view that the point of eating is to promote health, pointing out that this attitude is not universal and that cultures that perceive food as having purposes of pleasure, identity, and sociality may end up with better health.

He explains this seeming paradox by vetting, and then validating, the notion that nutritionism and, therefore, the whole Western framework through which we intellectualize the value of food is more a religious and faddish devotion to the mythology of simple solutions than a convincing and reliable conclusion of incontrovertible scientific research. Pollan spends the rest of his book explicating his first three phrases: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He contends that most of what Americans now buy in supermarkets, fast food stores, and restaurants is not in fact food, and that a practical tip is to eat only those things that people of his grandmother's generation would have recognized as food.

In 2009, his most recent book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual was published. This short work is a condensed version of his previous efforts, intended to provide a simple framework for healthy and sustainable diet. It is divided into three sections, further explicating Pollan's principles of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." It includes his rules (i.e., "let others sample your food" and "the whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead"). Pollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a former executive editor for Harper's Magazine, and author of five books, besides the above mentioned ones we mention A Place of My Own (1997), and Second Nature A Gardener's Education (1991).

His recent work has dealt with the practices of the meat industry, and he has written a number of articles on trends in American agriculture. He has received the Reuters World Conservation Union Global Awards in environmental journalism, the James Beard Foundation Awards for best magazine series in 2003, and the Genesis Award from the Humane Society of the United States. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2004), Best American Essays (1990 and 2003), The Animals: Practicing Complexity (2006) and the Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990).

I was born in 1945 in Nice, France, in a family of hotelkeepers and this is the reason why I tried to start a completely different career! In fact I missed my parents and my family in general, because of working commitments in hours that were unbearable for the children, but my jovial and enthusiast temper, after secondary school, soon made me take up the same life style! (even if I had arrived here only in 1969 just to improve the study of Italian).
I forgot my personal projects in the sector of tourism and got fond of Giorgio Pinchiorri’s work, who I met here in Florence (in 1972) a young “sommelier” when this specialization was still unknown to most people. Our feeling soon strengthened itself with the research of the quality and diffusion of oenology, soon supported by some gourmet cuisine tastings until we took up an even more complex mission: creating a real restaurant, and this happened in 1979, when we bought the shares of the various shareholders of the beginning of the business at Palazzo Giacometti-Cioffi, a sixteenth century palace with frescoed rooms. And so, in a very natural way I became a chef, working during the day and studying at night a traditional cuisine that was totally unknown to me, Italian cuisine! It was a revelation, which obviously spread to the rest of Italy, a country so various and rich of different oenogastronomy cultures! In the years Giorgio and I have been appreciated and awarded by the many national and international guides, until we have become the best restaurant in Italy for many years, acknowledged worldwide.
This year too, the general ranking finds us at the second place in Italy and we are very happy if we consider that there has been a great evolution of the “young” of this country, and finally also in the South of the country!!
Besides the excellent positions in the various gourmet cuisine guides (I’ve been the first woman to receive the third Michelin Star outside France and after mere Brazier back in 1950), I remember with pleasure receiving the “Caterina de Medici” award, for special merits in the field of Gourmet Cuisine, at Palazzo Vecchio, in 1994 and also receiving the “Fiorino d’oro” in 2004.
I’d also like to remind that I was appointed “woman of the year” by Pommery and the international association “Relais et Chateaux” for the year 2008! The municipality of Florence has recently awarded me the “Premio Firenze Donna”.

Gualtiero Marchesi is considered the Master of Italian cuisine, unceasing supporter of cuisine as a form of art.
After several experiences in Italy and abroad, in 1977 he opens in Milan his restaurant in via Bonvesin de la Riva, gaining an immediate success and obtaining, for the first time in Italy, in 1986, the three stars of the Michelin guide, which he will give back in 2008, the first chef in the world.
The gourmets Gault and Millau, in an interview at Time in 1990, mention his restaurant among the first ten in the world. He has received many acknowledgements and awards, Cavaliere and Commendatore of the Italian Republic and from the French Minister of Culture the title of “Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres”. In September 1993 he moves his restaurant in a villa at Erbusco, in the heart of Franciacorta.
His most important acknowledgements are the appointment as Cavaliere and Commendatore of the Italian Republic, the Ambrogino and the Longobardo d’oro, the Grand Prix Mémoire et Gratitude, the most prestigious award given by the International Gastronomy Academy “to the chef who, in the course of history, has left a mark for innovation”.
In 2004 he establishes the ALMA, the International School of Italian Cuisine of Colorno, where he is the Rector.
In 2008, in Milan, he opens the Ristorante Teatro alla Scala Il Marchesino and in 2009 he is awarded in Madrid among the eleven chefs in the world who have most influenced the last decade’s cuisine. In 2010 he creates the Foundation named after him with the mission of promoting the arts following the leitmotiv “the beautiful and the good”. In 2011 he receives, the first in Italy, the gold medal of the Ministry of Tourism as the Ambassador of Italian cuisine in the world.
On October 10th 2012, the University of Parma gives Master Gualtiero Marchesi the Honorary Degree in Gastronomy Sciences.
«If they address you, calling you Master, there isn’t much to rejoice, on the contrary to set your teeth and feel, again and at any age, the first of the students. This is why I say that we have to become Masters with the others. I was and I still am a pupil, with the enthusiasm and also the intemperance of who wants to know at any rate, adding one last question and then another one».
«As for me, I would like more and more young people with interests even opposite to cuisine, came to have dinner at my restaurant not to say they have eaten at Marchesi’s, but that they have learned something about food and the art of preparing it».

Born in Milan on May 17th 1937. In 1976, after selling the coffee, wine and food store after 12 years of activity in Corsico, just outside Milan, Ezio, with his wife Renata, buys an old tavern in the Lombard countryside, which they turn into the famous “Antica Osteria del Ponte” at Cassinetta di Lugagnano.
This is the beginning of a charming period as a self-taught man in the kitchen. At the beginning Santin offers the dishes of the Lombard tradition created and refined for his friends in the homely evenings, but with a particular attention to quality details. A true challenge for those times, the restaurant soon becomes a compulsory destination for the lovers of good cuisine.
Ezio Santin was a pioneer in Italy for the establishment of a new gastronomy culture based on the quality and freshness of the primary products and on the renewed bond with Lombard recipes.
His culinary philosophy has contributed to promote the culture of taste in the territory, to make the local products of excellence known and to spread the art of hospitality, besides teaching many young chefs that now represent the quality of Italian cuisine in the world, among whom, as an example, we remind Umberto Bombana, the first Italian Michelin three stars abroad, Hong Kong.
Ezio Santin has received the most prestigious national and international acknowledgements in his field since the late Seventies.
After a first mention in the Michelin Guide in 1977, he is given the first star in 1978. Two years later he receives the second star whereas the climax of success comes in 1990, with the highly deserved third Michelin star. The second three star restaurant in Italy.
In June 1994 Ezio receives from the Mayor of Milan the gold medal of the Milano Produttività award for his 34 years of praiseworthy commercial activity.
In 1996 the Antica Osteria del Ponte is appointed one of the 100 Best Restaurants in the World. In 2003 The American Academy of Hospitality Science gives him the Star Diamond Award.
Ezio’s dream of publishing a book about his “adventure”, from the debut in the sector of restoration to the top of success, comes true in 1995, on the occasion of the happy goal of 20 years of activity. In June 2005 the President of the Italian Republic, Ciampi, confers him the important acknowledgement of Cavaliere of the Republic.
He is the honorary President of the Group of Restaurants “Le Soste” which gathers the best restaurants in Italy.