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In the first part of this paper we will present a series o f Levi letters, between the I920's and 1930's, that he addressed to the Rockefeller Foundation's officers, who always supported his research, found in the archives of the Foundation itself. These letters are an important testimony of the Italian political and cultural climate of those years. A second part is dedicated to some of the 80 letters sent by Levi 's student Oliviero Mario Olivo, a professor o f the Medical Faculty in Bologna, from 1932 to 1964. Forty years after the death of Giuseppe Levi, we wanted to dedicate to his figure and that of the Professor Victor McKusick, a pioneer in medical genetics died in 2008, the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Genetic and Medicine in Ronzano-Bologna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to reconstruct the climate of Turin where he lived and worked Giuseppe Levi, the particular figures which animated the subalpine universities in the fascist period, the fruitful interaction between Jewish and anti-fascist world. Particular attention will be devoted to the different reactions of the Jewish community during the confidence to fascism in 1931 oath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three students who were subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize received part of their training in the Turin laboratory o f the anatomist Giuseppe Levi (1872 - 1965): Salvador E. Luria for research on bacterial genetics (1969), Renato Dulbecco on oncogenic viruses (1975) and Rita Levi Montalcini for the discovery of the nerve growth factor ( 1986). It is a rare case in the history of science, especially considering the different paths that his three pupils took in the US after their common internship in Levi's laboratory which focused on the microanatomy of the nervous system. Trying to reconstruct the reasons for these professional successes, in their autobiographies, all three students recognized the great merits of their master's methodology (dedication and rigor in the job, the setting up and publication of the experiment, strictness and encouragement in the evaluations), while identifying the move to US labs as the decisive factor in their careers (research policy, meritocracy and substantial funding). In this contribution, I will attempt to trace the paths that made it possible for three students from an Italian school based on histology and microscopic anatomy according to the German tradition to become three Nobel laureates in various disciplines based on a molecular approach. Understanding how this 'metamorphosis' occurred means reconstructing how individual micro-histories, coming from a local scientific and methodological context -laboratory techniques, religious backgrounds, fortuitous choices, friendships and academic relations-, merged with macro-histories involving national politics, the Second World War, and institutional and disciplinary divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]