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The interview concerns the role of scientific books in the Italian society from the 19 century until today. Having played an important role in the formation of a national scientific community, science popularization has offered a ceaseless high-quality production during the past two centuries. On the other hand, even today scientific publications do reach only a narrow élite. In the author’s opinion, only the school system has the power to widen the public for science in Italy. To what period could we date back the birth of a national scientific community in Italy? Which role did scientific books play in this process? The building of a national scientific community is of course such a complex process that I find it difficult to tell exactly when it can be considered as concluded in Italy. With respect to the 18 century and the beginning of the 19, we usually talk about a Republic of Letters, a supranational community set up also by a good number of Italian natural philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, anatomists, women too. But I suppose an Italian national community was formed only around and after the political unification. It is true that 1839 saw the first of a series of Congresses of Italian Scientists, but it was an attempt with questionable results, judging from historians’ accounts. Next to congresses, journals are interesting instruments to gauge the strength and cohesion of a community: the collaboration of a regular and quite broad team of scholars is the basis to a good scientific journal. So, for example in 1855 Il Nuovo Cimento was launched, but it became the official voice of an Italian Physics Society much later, only in 1897. For these and other reasons, in my opinion, to find an actual national community in Italy, we have to wait until the end of the 19 century, when the country started to take advantage of the political unification and of the university reform, which allowed the birth of new important institutions such as the Polytechnic of Milan, besides a series of new laboratories which were established in different universities. Despite these important achievements, in the opinion of some historians with whom I agree a real national community in Italy was ultimately set up during WW1, because of the important role, both institutional and scientific, played by the collaboration between scientists and politicians. What role did scientific books play in this process? If you mean popular science books, the genre I’m more familiar with, I can say that the success of science popularization in the second half of the 19 century played in Italy an important role in the formation of a national scientific community. Of course, this circumstance appeared in other European countries, first of all in the UK, where the so called “science for all” movement started around the 1830s. Scientists communicating to laypeople had a vital role in the formation of an image of the expert and of the scientific community in the public sphere. Popular science books and journals allowed scientists to present their work as essential to politicians and entrepreneurs, as well as to the general public: scientists entered the western public life as new powerful social actors in the age of colonialism and of the second

Popularizing science in Italy: a historical perspective. An interview with Paola Govoni